The Rollup

Santiago Santos, founder and investor focused on crypto valuation and token design, explains why tokens fail to compound value like equities. He explores commoditization of infrastructure, how L1s capture few fees despite large market caps, and why DeFi apps look undervalued. He maps where crypto-enabled businesses can actually win and what the next wave beyond stablecoins may look like.

Illia Polosukhin, NEAR co-founder focused on privacy-preserving AI and agent marketplaces. Eli Ben-Sasson, StarkWare co-founder and ZK/post-quantum crypto expert. Joel Valenzuela, Dash executive on privacy and payments. They unveil Iron Claw's credential-isolating framework. They debate agent-to-agent commerce, chain abstraction, post-quantum security, and internet-native micropayments.

Michael Svoboda, CEO of Liquity and longtime DeFi builder focused on ETH-backed, governance-minimized stablecoins. He contrasts treasury-backed and sovereign ETH-backed models. He outlines peer-to-peer credit and how holders earn yield directly. He explores ETH/LST resilience, distribution economics behind $10T volume, and trade-offs between freedom and regulation.

George Zeng, Chief Product Officer at NEAR and GM for NEAR AI, builds privacy-preserving, decentralized AI tools. He talks about where crypto capital is moving, NEAR’s confidential inference and private chat using TEEs, the rise of OpenClaw agents and security tradeoffs, local-first AI benefits, and how NEAR Intents enable real-world agent actions.

Nikhil Viswanathan, CEO of Alchemy and entrepreneur who builds AI agents, explains why crypto rails are ideal for autonomous agents. He discusses Starbucks-style balance loading, an agent (Dave) that built its own website, blockchain as a property/authenticity layer, and the four components that make agents truly powerful.

Haonan Li, founder and CEO of Codex and builder in stablecoin FX, explains bringing on-chain rails to cut FX costs and latency. He discusses why developing-market corridors matter, how crypto flattens traditional FX hierarchies, the Griffin company blend of crypto and TradFi, and regional stablecoins as FX rails rather than mere payment tokens.

Olivia Vande Woude, business development lead for tokenization at Ava Labs, works on bringing institutional assets on-chain. She discusses why tokenization structure matters. She explores vaults as a new institutional access path. She covers stablecoins shifting credit away from banks and the three tokenization models shaping investor rights.

Gracy Chen, CEO of Bitget, leads a major crypto exchange pivoting to compliant, tokenized mainstream assets. She breaks down the October 10 liquidity shock and why many altcoins are being delisted. She explains the rise of tokenized stocks and commodities, Bitget’s ‘universal exchange’ strategy, and the new, stricter token listing standards reshaping where volume lives.

Will Nuelle, a Galaxy Ventures investor focused on tokenization, stablecoins, and payments, talks about why stablecoin cards unexpectedly outcompete cross-border rails. He explores dollar access in emerging markets, fat interchange margins, on-chain lending and securitization, and how tokenized assets and shared ledgers could reshape payments and finance.

Jess Houlgrave, CEO of WalletConnect and payments/product leader, discusses bringing stablecoin payments to 40M terminals via an Ingenico integration. She covers why B2B stablecoin treasury flows are taking off. Topics include merchant benefits like lower fees and instant fiat settlement, on-chain vs card-based payments, QR vs NFC checkout, rewards and merchant incentives, and the path to broader on-chain payment adoption.