Crypto, Explained by the National Cryptocurrency Association

Most people can name the moment they decided something was not for them. Someone explained it badly, the room seemed to already understand, and asking felt worse than not knowing. That decision gets filed away as a preference and then sits there for years, never reopened.

In this episode, Ali Tager sits down with Lauren Weymouth, who leads the University Blockchain Research Initiative, Ripple's academic partnership program, which funds research at 63 universities around the world. Ali brings new NCA research showing that what keeps Americans out is not cost or distrust but knowledge, with roughly three-quarters saying they would be more likely to use crypto if it were better explained. Lauren pushes back on how we talk about it. She calls it a dignity gap rather than an information gap. People are not afraid of the technology, she argues. They are afraid of being the person in the room who asks the obvious question.

The back half is practical. Lauren makes the case that good education opens with a problem the person already has, that it has to be hands-on because nobody learns to swim from a book, that anything teaching only the upside is a sales pitch, and that it has to let people walk away. Then she says something against her own interests. She does not think the shift is primarily about education at all. She thinks it is about usefulness, and that the education follows. What she keeps returning to is that not understanding something yet is not a verdict on it, and it is not a verdict on you. Start plain and start small at nca.org, where you can find the research behind this conversation and free Crypto 101 material. 

Remember, crypto was always meant for everyone, including you.

What We Discuss:

• 0:00 - Why People Avoid Crypto
• 1:20 - Who Leads UBRI at Ripple
• 2:08 - Ripple's $50M Education Bet
• 5:40 - University Blockchain Research
• 9:33 - How the Crypto Conversation Shifted
• 12:24 - Top Crypto Misconceptions
• 15:00 - 33M Americans Eyeing Crypto
• 17:29 - The Dignity Gap in Crypto
• 18:49 - What Good Crypto Education Looks Like

• 28:51 - What Shifts Public Perception

Learn more about the National Cryptocurrency Association (NCA):Website: https://nca.org

X: @natcryptoassoc

Instagram: @natcryptoassoc

TikTok: @natcryptoassoc

LinkedIn: National Cryptocurrency Association

Facebook: National Cryptocurrency Association

Disclaimer: This content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, legal, or tax advice.

Picture someone who owns crypto. For most of us the same face shows up: a young guy, a wall of screens, a lot of jargon, and maybe a little too much confidence. That picture is doing real damage, because it tells everyone who does not see themselves in it that this was never meant for them.

In this episode, Ali Tager sits down with Kristina Sherk, a headshot photographer and Photoshop educator based outside Washington, D.C. Kristina has spent a decade helping people look and sound their best on camera and teaching other creatives to do the same. She did not arrive at crypto through a hot tip or a price chart. She arrived through a very ordinary pressure a lot of Americans will recognize, which was a business that stopped when the world did. Nobody needed a headshot in a mask. Her husband raised the idea, and she found herself with an unfamiliar amount of free time and a question she was not willing to answer casually.

What she did next is the actual story. She refused to put money into an asset class she could not explain, so she watched what she describes as every documentary known to man, and kept going until something clicked. The thing that finally landed was a problem she already understood better than most people, because she lives it: anything digital can be copied. She watermarks her photographs and people crop the watermark out. Napster and Limewire did the same thing to music and film. So how do you build something digital that cannot simply be duplicated, and why does the answer make a shared, public list of receipts the most interesting invention of her lifetime? Kristina also talks about growing up in the Philippines and Ivory Coast while her father worked as an economist for development banks, and what it did to her sense of how differently money works depending on where you happen to be standing.

The conversation ends where a lot of people actually need it to end, which is on proportion. Ali is candid that she is not all in, and walks through what sits alongside the crypto in her own financial life. Kristina talks about verification, and why a system anyone can audit changes what is possible when something goes wrong. Neither of them tells you what to do. That is the point. Read Kristina's story and find free Crypto 101 courses at nca.org, built for people who are curious but nervous about a first step. Remember, crypto was always meant for everyone, including you.

What We Discuss:

• 0:00 Crypto in Pop Culture
• 1:10 Meet Kelvin Sparks Jr. from The Block
• 3:18 How Media Misrepresents Crypto
• 5:14 Women in Crypto
• 8:14 Mainstream vs Crypto Media
• 9:54 Explaining Crypto Simply
• 12:08 Finding Crypto Story Ideas
• 18:44 Navigating Crypto Twitter
• 29:39 Red Flags in Crypto Media
• 30:49 Why Crypto Changes Lives

Learn more about the National Cryptocurrency Association (NCA):

Website: https://nca.org

X: @natcryptoassoc

Instagram: @natcryptoassoc

TikTok: @natcryptoassoc

LinkedIn: National Cryptocurrency Association

Facebook: National Cryptocurrency Association

Disclaimer: This content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, legal, or tax advice.

Picture someone who owns crypto. For most of us the same face shows up: a young guy, a wall of screens, a lot of jargon, and maybe a little too much confidence. That picture is doing real damage, because it tells everyone who does not see themselves in it that this was never meant for them.

In this episode, Ali Tager sits down with Kristina Sherk, a headshot photographer and Photoshop educator based outside Washington, D.C. Kristina has spent a decade helping people look and sound their best on camera and teaching other creatives to do the same. She did not arrive at crypto through a hot tip or a price chart. She arrived through a very ordinary pressure a lot of Americans will recognize, which was a business that stopped when the world did. Nobody needed a headshot in a mask. Her husband raised the idea, and she found herself with an unfamiliar amount of free time and a question she was not willing to answer casually.

What she did next is the actual story. She refused to put money into an asset class she could not explain, so she watched what she describes as every documentary known to man, and kept going until something clicked. The thing that finally landed was a problem she already understood better than most people, because she lives it: anything digital can be copied. She watermarks her photographs and people crop the watermark out. Napster and Limewire did the same thing to music and film. So how do you build something digital that cannot simply be duplicated, and why does the answer make a shared, public list of receipts the most interesting invention of her lifetime? Kristina also talks about growing up in the Philippines and Ivory Coast while her father worked as an economist for development banks, and what it did to her sense of how differently money works depending on where you happen to be standing.

The conversation ends where a lot of people actually need it to end, which is on proportion. Ali is candid that she is not all in, and walks through what sits alongside the crypto in her own financial life. Kristina talks about verification, and why a system anyone can audit changes what is possible when something goes wrong. Neither of them tells you what to do. That is the point. Read Kristina's story and find free Crypto 101 courses at nca.org, built for people who are curious but nervous about a first step. Remember, crypto was always meant for everyone, including you.

What We Discuss:

• 0:00 AI & Crypto Headlines Explained
• 0:49 Why AI Agents Need Crypto
• 1:57 Stripe's $7B OpenRouter Deal
• 2:35 Stripe's Stablecoin Strategy
• 3:15 Coinbase AI Fi Explained
• 3:26 Robinhood & Binance AI Agent Trading
• 4:57 AI Agent Safety: The Off Switch
• 5:35 What Is X402? HTTP 402 Explained
• 6:35 Ramp AI Payments & Audit Trails
• 9:19 How to Spot Real AI Crypto News

Learn more about the National Cryptocurrency Association (NCA):

Website: https://nca.org

X: @natcryptoassoc

Instagram: @natcryptoassoc

TikTok: @natcryptoassoc

LinkedIn: National Cryptocurrency Association

Facebook: National Cryptocurrency Association

Disclaimer: This content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, legal, or tax advice.

Yesterday the Senate voted on whether to advance the Clarity Act, and it did not get the votes it needed. In this short update, Ali explains what that actually means, starting with the thing worth hearing first: if you already hold crypto, nothing changes.

The vote was a cloture vote, not a vote on whether the Clarity Act becomes law. It was a vote on whether the Senate could begin debating it, and that required 60 bipartisan votes. The bill fell short. Ali walks through why, including the issues lawmakers remain divided on: ethics rules around government officials and their involvement in crypto, illicit finance provisions, and how the bill treats software developers building on blockchain networks. None of these were new disagreements, and significant compromises had been made on all of them, but they were enough to stop the bill moving forward.

Then the part that matters most for anyone feeling uneasy. Crypto is still legal to own and use. Markets continue operating exactly as they did before the vote. Holdings, wallets, exchanges, and transactions all continue as normal. What stays unsettled is the bigger question, which is that the United States still has no comprehensive federal framework for digital assets, so the SEC and the CFTC will keep filling that gap through their own rulemaking.

Ali also puts the moment in context. A version of the Clarity Act passed the House in July 2025 and cleared the Senate Banking Committee in May 2026. It did not clear the full Senate. The groundwork is there, and the conversation about clear rules, consumer protections, and who oversees what is not going away. For a full breakdown of what the Clarity Act covers, there is an explainer at nca.org, and the learning portal there is built for anyone just trying to make sense of all this. Remember, crypto was always meant for everyone, including you.

What We Discuss:

• 0:00 What Happened Yesterday
• 0:41 Why the Bill Fell Short
• 1:06 What This Means for You
• 1:52 What Happens Next
• 2:36 Resources & Outro

Learn more about the National Cryptocurrency Association (NCA):

Website: https://nca.org

X: @natcryptoassoc

Instagram: @natcryptoassoc

TikTok: @natcryptoassoc

LinkedIn: National Cryptocurrency Association

Facebook: National Cryptocurrency Association

Disclaimer: This content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, legal, or tax advice.

Open a news app, a feed, or a newspaper right now and the same two words keep showing up together: crypto and AI. They get stacked in headlines so often that it starts to feel like they are merging into one bigger thing. They are not. They are two separate technologies, and what is actually happening between them is smaller, more specific, and a lot more useful to understand.

In this episode, Ali walks through where the two genuinely overlap and then turns to the headlines that make it sound like more than it is. The real connection starts at the last step of a task. An AI assistant can already answer a question, plan a trip, and compare prices, but the moment money has to move, a person has traditionally had to step in and finish it. That wall is coming down, and several companies are racing to be the one that takes it down. MoonPay's Paybox connects a payment wallet directly to assistants like Claude and ChatGPT. Cloudflare built a wallet system letting AI agents hold stablecoins to pay for online tools. Visa published a report arguing that when an agent needs to pay for something as small as a single API call, card fees would cost more than the purchase itself. Google is building a shared set of rules so agents can pay whichever way fits the job.

The pattern underneath all of it is simple. AI agents need to move very small amounts of money instantly, at any hour, anywhere, and that happens to be the thing crypto is already good at. None of this is as new as it sounds either, since programmable payments have been running for years through smart contracts that release funds when a condition is met. Ali also covers the direction people miss entirely, which is AI protecting crypto rather than spending it, including Ripple building AI into how the XRP Ledger gets developed to catch security problems before they go live.

Then the myths. Ali breaks down what is really behind the story about Bitcoin miners becoming AI data centers, why a crypto venture firm raising a large AI fund is not the same as crypto being replaced, and why a viral number about AI agent payments deserved a second look before everyone repeated it. By the end you will be able to read the next crypto and AI headline and know exactly which part is worth your attention. Want to keep learning? Head to nca.org, where we break these tools down in plain language for people at every stage. Remember, crypto was always meant for everyone, including you.

What We Discuss:

• 0:00 AI Can Now Move Money
• 2:04 How AI Payments Actually Work
• 5:10 What’s Real vs What’s Hype

Learn more about the National Cryptocurrency Association (NCA):Website: https://nca.org

X: @natcryptoassoc

Instagram: @natcryptoassoc

TikTok: @natcryptoassoc

LinkedIn: National Cryptocurrency Association

Facebook: National Cryptocurrency Association

Disclaimer: This content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, legal, or tax advice.

Picture someone who owns crypto. For most of us the same face shows up: a young guy, a wall of screens, a lot of jargon, and maybe a little too much confidence. That picture is doing real damage, because it tells everyone who does not see themselves in it that this was never meant for them.

In this episode, Ali Tager sits down with Kristina Sherk, a headshot photographer and Photoshop educator based outside Washington, D.C. Kristina has spent a decade helping people look and sound their best on camera and teaching other creatives to do the same. She did not arrive at crypto through a hot tip or a price chart. She arrived through a very ordinary pressure a lot of Americans will recognize, which was a business that stopped when the world did. Nobody needed a headshot in a mask. Her husband raised the idea, and she found herself with an unfamiliar amount of free time and a question she was not willing to answer casually.

What she did next is the actual story. She refused to put money into an asset class she could not explain, so she watched what she describes as every documentary known to man, and kept going until something clicked. The thing that finally landed was a problem she already understood better than most people, because she lives it: anything digital can be copied. She watermarks her photographs and people crop the watermark out. Napster and Limewire did the same thing to music and film. So how do you build something digital that cannot simply be duplicated, and why does the answer make a shared, public list of receipts the most interesting invention of her lifetime? Kristina also talks about growing up in the Philippines and Ivory Coast while her father worked as an economist for development banks, and what it did to her sense of how differently money works depending on where you happen to be standing.

The conversation ends where a lot of people actually need it to end, which is on proportion. Ali is candid that she is not all in, and walks through what sits alongside the crypto in her own financial life. Kristina talks about verification, and why a system anyone can audit changes what is possible when something goes wrong. Neither of them tells you what to do. That is the point. Read Kristina's story and find free Crypto 101 courses at nca.org, built for people who are curious but nervous about a first step. Remember, crypto was always meant for everyone, including you.

What We Discuss:

0:00 – Intro: "Bigger Than the Internet"

1:11 – Meet Kristina Sherk

3:08 – COVID & the Push to Learn

7:14 – Growing Up Around the World

13:22 – The Double Spend Problem

16:24 – The "Aha" Moment

25:46 – Crypto & Human Rights

32:36 – Banking the Unbanked

Learn more about the National Cryptocurrency Association (NCA):

Website: https://nca.org

X: @natcryptoassoc

Instagram: @natcryptoassoc

TikTok: @natcryptoassoc

LinkedIn: National Cryptocurrency Association

Facebook: National Cryptocurrency Association

Disclaimer: This content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, legal, or tax advice.

There is a specific kind of moment that keeps people out of crypto. You are scrolling, or you are at dinner, and somebody starts talking about yield and liquidity pools and staking rewards like it is all perfectly normal conversation, and you are just sitting there thinking you do not know what any of that means. That feeling is not a knowledge problem. It is a vocabulary problem, and it has a fix.

In this episode, Ali walks through the five terms that unlock the DeFi world: DeFi itself, liquidity pools, yield, staking, and DEXs. The through-line is that none of these ideas are actually new. Lending, borrowing, trading, earning interest, we already do all of it in traditional finance. DeFi just does it without a middleman such as the bank, instead the rules live in software rather than at a company, and the trade-off is more access and flexibility with less of the safety net people are used to.

Each term comes with an analogy built to make it stick. A liquidity pool becomes a community lemonade stand where everyone brings ingredients to one big batch and everyone who contributes gets a share when a cup sells. Yield gets compared to interest, including why a platform advertising an unusually high return is a signal to slow down and ask where that return is actually coming from, and what people mean by the fancier sounding yield farming. Staking works like agreeing to leave money alone for a set period, with the detail most people miss, which is the un-staking window that can run days or even a week before you can pull your crypto back out. And the difference between a centralized exchange (CEX) and a decentralized exchange (DEX) becomes a grocery store versus a farmer's market, where one company controls everything on the shelves and the other lets you trade directly with whoever shows up.

By the end, the jargon stops sounding like a foreign language and starts sounding like familiar ideas wearing different clothes. Want to explore how this works without putting any money on the line? Try the free crypto simulator at nca.org and practice in a risk-free environment. Remember, crypto was always meant for everyone, including you.

What We Discuss:0:00 - What is DeFi?0:24 - Crypto jargon explained0:49 - 5 key DeFi terms1:10 - Decentralized finance1:47 - DeFi vs banks2:06 - Liquidity pools3:09 - Yield in DeFi3:30 - High yield = high risk3:48 - Staking crypto4:45 - DEX vs CEX

Learn more about the National Cryptocurrency Association (NCA):Website: https://nca.org

X: @natcryptoassoc

Instagram: @natcryptoassoc

TikTok: @natcryptoassoc

LinkedIn: National Cryptocurrency Association

Facebook: National Cryptocurrency Association

Disclaimer: This content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, legal, or tax advice.

For a lot of people, the word wealth puts up a wall. It sounds like a club you were never invited to, something for people who already have money and already know the language. But NCA's research found that when everyday crypto holders describe how the technology makes them feel about their financial lives, the top words are not rich or wealthy. They are proud and confident, with 83% reporting they feel that way.

Ali sits down with Dr. Tonya Evans to understand where that confidence comes from. Tonya is a former tenured law professor who spent nearly two decades in legal academia before pivoting fully into digital assets. She built the first blockchain, cryptocurrency, and law certificate program at a US law school, wrote Digital Money Demystified, and hosts the SiriusXM podcast Confidently Crypto. Her origin story is its own hook: an intellectual property lawyer researching orphan works in copyright who tumbled into a two-week rabbit hole over one holiday and came out convinced this technology would change the world.

The heart of the conversation is a distinction most people never learn: the difference between income and wealth. Tonya explains why wealth is less about a windfall and more about ownership and control, how capital assets are meant to work harder than the hours you trade for a paycheck, and why crypto is taxed in the US as a capital asset rather than a currency, a detail she says trips up newcomers constantly. She is candid about risk, too. She walks through the myths she wrote her book to address, from proof-of-work energy concerns to the idea that crypto is only for criminals, and offers a memorable rebuttal on which asset bad actors actually prefer.

The through-line is trust: trusting the technology, trusting the information, and, hardest of all, learning to trust yourself with your own financial decisions. Tonya makes the case that new technology can expand access, but access without understanding only deepens the gaps it was meant to close, which is why she keeps returning to literacy as the thing that actually builds and protects wealth. Read Digital Money Demystified or find free Crypto 101 courses at nca.org. Because crypto was always meant to be for everyone, including you. Learn more at nca.org.

What We Discuss:

• 0:00 — Wealth Without Gatekeepers
• 1:36 — Meet Dr. Tonya Evans
• 3:16 — Law Professor to Crypto Advocate
• 8:45 — The Trust Revelation
• 13:36 — Breaking Crypto Myths
• 16:39 — Crypto Is Only for Criminals?
• 27:10 — Real Wealth Building
• 34:15 — Black Wall Street to Web Street
• 39:50 — Crypto Regulation Explained
• 49:24 — What Crypto Needs Next

Learn more about the National Cryptocurrency Association

(NCA):Website: https://nca.org

X: @natcryptoassoc

Instagram: @natcryptoassoc

TikTok: @natcryptoassoc

LinkedIn: National Cryptocurrency Association

Facebook: National Cryptocurrency Association

Disclaimer: This content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, legal, or tax advice.

Sixty-seven million Americans use crypto today, roughly one in four adults, up from one in five a year ago. But NCA's 2026 State of Crypto Holders research found that more than a third of those owners say the thing holding them back from using it more is not money or access. It is that they still do not really understand what they own. Adoption is running ahead of understanding, which almost never happens with a credit card or a 401(k).

Ali sits down with Kara Calvert, Head of US Policy at Coinbase, and Kevin Boucher, Chief Strategy and Communications Officer at Operation HOPE, to unpack why more crypto content has not closed that gap, and what three organizations with very different incentives built to try. Kevin traces Operation HOPE's roots back more than three decades of financial literacy work and describes the moment at a special edition Hope Global Forum when the industry and regulators sat at the same table for the first time. His read on what happened next: the government hesitated, chose to do nothing, and communities were caught in the middle.

Kara makes an unusually candid case for why Coinbase did not simply build this alone. People see educational material from an exchange and wonder what is being sold to them, so a credible third party was the missing piece. She also walks through the pattern she has watched repeat for decades, from her grandmother who lived to 102 and never once carried a credit card, through chip and PIN, through tap to pay, and why she thinks people arrive at crypto for the same reason they adopted each of those. The conversation gets specific on scams, too. Kevin explains why scammers stay a step ahead and which populations get targeted hardest, Kara covers what to actually do in the first hours after you are defrauded, and Ali shares the impersonation scam using NCA's own name that landed in her inbox the day before recording.

The last stretch zooms out to financial inclusion, a phrase Kevin argues means different things depending on who you ask. His framing is that new technology can expand access, but access without understanding only deepens the gaps it was supposed to close. That is the thinking behind the free course now running through Operation HOPE's network of coaches across 300 cities and 1,500 locations, people who live in the communities they serve, with no product to sell. Take the course yourself at operationhope.org or find more free Crypto 101 material at nca.org. Because crypto was always meant to be for everyone, including you. Learn more at nca.org.

What We Discuss:

• 0:00 – Intro: The Crypto Literacy Gap

• 0:36 – Why 35% of Crypto Users Still Don't Understand It

• 2:04 – How This Free Crypto Course Was Built

• 3:45 – Operation Hope's Journey Into Crypto

• 16:03 – Crypto Scams: How Big Is the Problem?

• 23:14 – Inside the Free Crypto Literacy Course

• 29:47 – Crypto Education vs. DC Policy

• 35:32 – Can Crypto Close the Wealth Gap?

• 39:48 – What Financial Inclusion Actually Means

Learn more about the National Cryptocurrency Association (NCA):Website: https://nca.org

X: @natcryptoassoc

Instagram: @natcryptoassoc

TikTok: @natcryptoassoc

LinkedIn: National Cryptocurrency Association

Facebook: National Cryptocurrency Association

Disclaimer: This content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, legal, or tax advice.

When people argue about crypto, they usually argue about price. A new economic report suggests the more important story is happening somewhere else entirely: the American job market. In this episode, host Ali Tager sits down with economist Oliver Browne, who helped develop NCA’s Crypto At Work report, to unpack what the numbers say about crypto as a full-fledged American industry rather than just an asset class.

Browne starts by busting a few common myths, that crypto work is only coding and finance, that the jobs all sit in Silicon Valley, and that they vanish the moment prices drop. According to the report, the crypto ecosystem already supports roughly 232,000 jobs across the US in 2026, spanning customer support, accounting, legal, operations, and compliance. And Browne explains that for every direct crypto job, the report finds six more are supported throughout the wider economy, a ripple effect he compares to tossing a stone into a pond, reaching everyone from the law firm and the data center to the corner restaurant and the DoorDash driver.

The conversation digs into the parts that surprised Browne most: an average crypto salary of around $133,000 a year, roughly double the US median, and a map of opportunity that runs well beyond the coasts into Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, and a stretch of heartland and energy-belt states. 

The takeaway, in Browne's framing, is that the question is no longer whether crypto matters to the American economy, but how much, and who gets to share in it.

What We Discuss:

• 0:00 Crypto myth busted
• 0:20 232K jobs created
• 0:55 Not "crypto jobs" soon
• 1:55 Real people, not just prices
• 3:15 Myth: finance-only jobs
• 4:40 Myth: Silicon Valley only
• 7:00 State-by-state job data
• 9:05 Crypto works remotely
• 9:35 Myth: prices kill jobs
• 11:00 Real crypto job roles
• 13:20 How 232K was calculated
• 14:05 1 job supports 6 more
• 15:35 Which states are growing
• 17:00 Wages: $133K average
• 18:30 Wage ripple effects
• 20:10 $55B economic impact
• 22:35 Everyday industries impacted
• 26:15 Crypto bigger than tobacco mfg.
• 29:15 Rapid-fire: Finish the Sentence
• 34:00 Recap and takeaways

Learn more about the National Cryptocurrency Association (NCA):Website: https://nca.org

X: @natcryptoassoc

Instagram: @natcryptoassoc

TikTok: @natcryptoassoc

LinkedIn: National Cryptocurrency Association

Facebook: National Cryptocurrency Association

Disclaimer: This content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, legal, or tax advice.