Bits and Borders

Christian Catalini is a co-founder of Lightspark, co-creator of Libra and founder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab.

He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss why AI is making intelligence cheap while verification remains scarce, and how businesses can compete by owning proprietary information and standing behind AI-generated work.

They also discuss why he expects most everyday agentic commerce to use existing payment rails, with a potential role for crypto in small, cross-border machine-to-machine payments.
You can connect with Christian Catalini on LinkedIn: 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ccatalini/

Connect with Aaron Stanley on Linkedin

https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronstanley27/

For editorial and sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Welcome to the Intent Layer, a special Bits and Borders miniseries exploring the agentic finance frontier

Our first episode is with Erik Reppel: creator of x402, a Coinbase advisor on agentic commerce and the former head of engineering at Coinbase Developer Platform.

He joins host Aaron Stanley live from Ai4 to discuss how pay-per-use payments let agents buy data, content and API access while completing a task, without requiring a separate subscription or account for every service they use.

Reppel explains how this access could give agents a changing set of capabilities as new services become available, and describes the “agentic premium” he has observed among API customers willing to pay more per request to avoid account setup and prefunding.

The conversation also covers why stablecoins work for small transactions, where credit cards still offer advantages, and how publishers could charge agents for content while continuing to serve ads to human readers. Reppel closes with a practical suggestion: give an agent a small payment budget and try a transaction to see how access to paid services changes what it can do.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

01:20 Erik’s background and the x402 Foundation

02:40 What x402 does and the HTTP 402 status code

04:51 Conversational commerce versus autonomous commerce

07:42 Agent budgets, stablecoins and credit cards

11:02 Micropayments and new business models

12:06 Dynamic tool access and the agentic premium

16:19 Why payment companies are backing open standards 19:57 Give your agent a payment budget

You can connect with Erik on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikreppel/

Subscribe to Bits and Borders: https://bitsborders.substack.com/

For editorial and sponsorship inquires, please contact [email protected]

Rony Vernet is an electronic engineer, physics researcher and Brazi's leading UAP researcher. He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss his argument that the race for artificial intelligence may also be a race to reverse-engineer UAP technology.

Rony recounts his own close encounters and investigations in Varginha, the Amazon, the Atacama Desert and Antarctica. They also examine what broader disclosure could mean for national security, energy markets, government credibility and humanity’s understanding of consciousness.

You can connect with Rony Vernet on X/Twitter

For editorial and sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Kristin Smith is President of the Solana Policy Institute. She joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss why the Clarity Act stalled in the US Senate.

Kristin explains how the politics around President Trump, opposition from the banking lobby and a shifting Democratic electorate derailed the bill, and why she believes the industry still came out ahead as the SEC and CFTC move to write rules on their own. They also discuss the risk of a political backlash and crypto's shift toward financial infrastructure.

You can connect with Kristin Smith on LinkedIn

For editorial and sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] to Bits and Borders:

Bits and Borders is presented by Sumsub

Sumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub's internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub's customer base.

Read the full report here:

Marcos Allende is CEO and co-founder of Blerify. He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss why AI is making passwords, selfie checks and passport scans obsolete as a way to prove identity online.

Marcos explains how Blerify's identity wallets and blockchain-based trust registry allow digital IDs to be verified across borders, and why companies and governments need to adopt post-quantum cryptography now.

The conversation also covers where quantum computing stands in 2026 and what it could unlock beyond breaking encryption.You can connect with Marcos on LinkedIn

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Bits and Borders is presented by SumsubSumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub's internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub's customer base.Read the full report here: Connect with Aaron Stanley on LinkedIn: Follow Bits and Borders on LinkedIn: Follow Bits and Borders on X

For editorial and sponsorship enquiries: [email protected]

Didier Lavallée is the CEO of Tetra Digital Group, the Canadian trust company behind CAD Digital (CADD), a Canadian dollar stablecoin that launched in May.

He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss why Canada went so long without a usable domestic stablecoin, and how Tetra grew out of the QuadrigaCX collapse into the country's first qualified digital asset custodian.

They get into the early demand for CADD in remittances, US trade flows and domestic settlement, and why the lack of real-time rails in Canada is pushing treasury desks toward programmatic payments.

Didier also makes the case for non-USD stablecoins and for Canadian-owned financial infrastructure at a tense moment with Washington.

Connect with Didier on LinkedIn

Connect with Aaron on Linkedin

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Bits and Borders is presented by Sumsub

Sumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub's internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub's customer base.

Read the full report here

Alvin Kan is the COO of Bitget Wallet. He joins host Aaron Stanley at Blockchain Rio to discuss the shift from crypto wallet to everyday finance app, where users save, spend and invest dollars in one place.

In August, daily payment transactions on the wallet overtook daily trading transactions for the first time in its eight-year history.

Kan explains why he expects payments and trading apps to converge, how demand differs across Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America, and why he thinks newcomers rather than incumbent institutions will win the stablecoin era.

Connect with Alvin Kan on LinkedIn

Connect with Aaron Stanley on Linkedin

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Bits and Borders is presented by Sumsub

Sumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub's internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub's customer base.

Read the full report here: https://sumsub.com/crypto-industry-report-2026/?utm_source=promenade&utm_medium=media&utm_campaign=crypto-report_report_2026

Gean Chu is a partner at Honey Island Capital. He joins host Aaron Stanley for a deep dive on quantum computing, which has become one of the main factors weighing on crypto markets in 2026.

Gean breaks down the March paper from Google Quantum AI that cut the estimated hardware requirement for breaking Bitcoin twentyfold, explains why roughly 6.9 million bitcoins already have their public keys exposed on chain, and argues the harder problem is the coins sitting in Satoshi-era wallets that nobody can move.

He also lays out the mitigation plans under discussion, the realistic timelines, and why he thinks the risk is already priced in.

You can connect with Gean Chu on LinkedIn

Subscribe to Bits and Borders on Substack

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Bits and Borders is presented by Sumsub

Sumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub's internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub's customer base.

Read the full report here:

Raagulan Pathy is the CEO of Kast. He joins host Aaron Stanley at Blockchain Rio 2026, a year after his first appearance and roughly $80 million in Series A funding later.

Rags explains why he thinks the stablecoin neobank market is winner take most, why Kast scrapped its planned token airdrop in favor of equity, and what the company found when 20 to 30% of its users started running business spend through a consumer card.

He also makes the case that Latin America has the strongest product-market fit for stablecoins anywhere in the world.

You can connect with Rags on LinkedIn

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Bits and Borders is presented by Sumsub

Sumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub's internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub's customer base.

Read the full report here: https://sumsub.com/crypto-industry-report-2026/?utm_source=promenade&utm_medium=media&utm_campaign=crypto-report_report_2026

Ilya Brovin is Chief Growth Officer of Sumsub. He joins host Aaron Stanley at Bitso Business' Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City to discuss how AI is changing identity fraud.

Sumsub onboards 12 to 15 million people a month, and Brovin describes a clear shift over the past year: criminals have stopped faking documents by hand and started training agents to attempt verification programmatically, at machine speed and scale.

The conversation covers why deepfake detection alone does not work, what reusable identity looks like in practice, and how verification changes when the customer is an agent rather than a person.

You can connect with Ilya Brovin on LinkedIn

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Bits and Borders is presented by Sumsub

Sumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub's internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub's customer base.

Read the full report here: