Unchained

Sean Murray, Head of Special Projects and Crypto Lead at Fuse Energy and Revolut alum, discusses why aging grids are choking clean energy. He likens grid congestion to blockchain L1 limits. He outlines coordinating smart homes, EVs, and batteries via a tokenized network to unlock wasted renewables and explains Fuse’s Energy Dollar mechanics and regulatory groundwork.

Robbie Petersen, Dragonfly junior partner who studies crypto and agentic commerce dynamics. Noah Levine, a16z partner focused on crypto and Web3 investments. They debate whether cards or stablecoins power agentic transactions. They discuss headless merchants, fraud and risk scoring gaps, instant settlement tradeoffs, discoverability of headless services, and whether front ends or backends capture value.

Omer Goldberg, founder and CEO of Chaos Labs and DeFi risk analyst, breaks down the Resolv hack timeline and why a single key and audit gaps mattered. He covers how keys were compromised, supply-chain and operational failures, contagion through lending pools, and practical mitigations like rate limits and multi-party controls.

They unpack Trump’s surprise five-day pause on strikes and how markets quickly repriced oil and Bitcoin. The hosts debate Iran’s internal dynamics and regional military moves. They analyze the Fed’s divided dot plot and inflation risks. Tech and AI take center stage with skepticism about Elon’s chip fab and discussion of where AI and crypto meet in future product markets.

Laurens Fraussen, research analyst at Kaiko who studies crypto liquidity and derivatives, breaks down collapsing liquidity and a quiet geographic shift in buyers. He covers perp funding, options flow, and why markets barely reacted to SEC/CFTC guidance. Laurens also explores agentic commerce, its payment implications, and the security and stability challenges for machine-driven payments.

Adeniyi Abiodun, co-founder and CPO of Mysten Labs, explains Hashi, a trust-minimized protocol to enable native Bitcoin DeFi for institutions. He discusses how Hashi avoids wrapped-Bitcoin issues, its MPC validator design and custody options. Topics include BTC-denominated insurance, on-chain rated Bitcoin bonds, supported stablecoins, oracle pricing, and institutional adoption hurdles.

They unpack Trade[XYZ] securing an S&P 500 license and what that could mean for onchain perps. They recount the $50M Aave mobile swap disaster and debate whether UIs should block high-slippage trades. They dissect a controversial Vanity Fair crypto shoot and why certain figures drew the most heat. They also argue about the Ethereum Foundation’s new mandate and its real-world impact.

Jane Khodarkovsky, sanctions and illicit finance expert and former federal prosecutor, breaks down the Binance lawsuit over Iran-linked flows and the sanctions risks around sophisticated intermediaries. The conversation also covers regulatory moves from the CFTC and SEC, the limits of no-action letters, and whether DeFi needs best-execution guardrails after a $50M Aave swap loss.

Across Protocol wants to retire its token in exchange for equity. Is the DAO model structurally broken? Thank you to our sponsor! Adaptive Security With Across Protocol proposing to retire its ACX token in favor of equity, a long-simmering question in crypto governance is finally breaking into the open: do token holders actually have meaningful ownership, or just the illusion of it?  As the regulatory environment under the new U.S. administration shifts dramatically from the Gensler era, the structures that crypto teams were forced to build may now be working against the very communities they were meant to serve.  Ryan Yi, founder of Onchain Group, and Felipe Montealegre, co-founder and CIO of Theia, have studied these incentive structures closely, and what they have found is uncomfortable. From PumpFun's suppressed valuation to the perverse incentives baked into token buyouts, this conversation examines whether the DAO model was ever built to last, and what governance actually needs to look like if crypto is going to compete with global finance. Guests: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Ryan Yi, Founder of Onchain Group ⁠⁠⁠⁠Felipe Montealegre, Co-Founder & Chief Investment Officer at Theia Links: Read our Aave deep dive here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Hoffman, Bankless impresario and crypto commentator, argues Ethereum may be leaning toward a sanctuary-first vision. Taylor Monahan, former MetaMask security lead turned independent security practitioner, brings builder-focused, practical perspectives. They debate the EF’s CROPS mandate, whether culture or tech drives startups to Solana, comms failures, and if the foundation should prioritize research or active builder support.