Raz Niv, Co-Founder and CTO of Blockaid with a background in cyber intelligence and cybersecurity, joins High Stakes with Alex Nwaka to explore why security is becoming a critical enabler of institutional crypto adoption as more value, transactions, and financial infrastructure move on chain.

Raz explains how Blockaid approaches real-time security before and after transactions, why traditional institutions need confidence around unfamiliar blockchain risks, and how the industry’s growing maturity, stablecoins, and real-world use cases are bringing more enterprises into digital assets. He also breaks down how AI is changing both sides of cybersecurity, giving attackers new ways to scale exploits while helping defenders improve detection and threat intelligence.

The conversation offers founders, institutional leaders, and Web3 operators a practical perspective on building security into products early, meeting the reliability standards enterprises expect, and preparing for a future where autonomous AI agents may execute a significant share of blockchain transactions. Raz also explains why usability, regulation, and security will need to improve together if on-chain financial infrastructure is going to reach mainstream institutional scale.

#CryptoSecurity #DigitalAssets #OnChainSecurity #CryptoTreasuryRisk #RazNiv

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raz-niv-22b741214/
Blockaid: https://www.blockaid.io
X (Blockaid): https://x.com/blockaid_

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Crypto founders and bank executives building digital asset strategy will learn why dismissing regulated finance as too slow is costing them first-mover position in credit markets.

Marcos Viriato, CEO of Parfin, processed over a billion dollars a month in stablecoin volume for banks before most institutions had finished their pilots, and his hard-won lesson is concrete: the convergence of DeFi protocols and regulated finance is already live, and collateral mobility on-chain is the use case that will redraw how banks compete on credit. He maps the technical stack banks are not prepared for, from private key custody to on-chain KYT, and explains why native asset issuance beats synthetic tokenization for institutions that want real ownership, not just exposure.

Viriato traces Parfin's product evolution across three layers: crypto as a service, stablecoin as a service processing over a billion dollars a month, and tokenization as a service through Rails. Rails began four years ago when a Brazilian bank needed to privately tokenize certificates of deposit at a rate of 1.2 to 1.3 million per day, a volume that exposed Hyperledger Besu's 400-transaction-per-second ceiling. Parfin forked the Ethereum client, built Rails Private, and reached 15,000 transactions per second. The public chain launched in late April 2025. A JP Morgan Kinexis Epic benchmark ranked Rails first in privacy, a result Viriato ties directly to two years building under Brazil's CBDC project and deploying 13 production use cases including privacy auctions and DVP settlement.

For builders evaluating chain architecture, Viriato's framework is worth stress-testing: permission chains handle internal control and compliance, public chains handle distribution and liquidity network effects, and DTCC's own multi-chain announcement confirms neither approach wins outright. On staffing, he flags that Solidity developers actively avoid bank environments, which makes outsourcing node infrastructure rational while keeping private key custody and application-layer business logic in-house. His eighteen-month prediction adds a concrete horizon: expect multiple US bank-issued stablecoins, Goldman and JP Morgan offering full crypto prime brokerage including custody, and the first meaningful on-chain collateral mobility against tokenized instruments used to cover margin and secure loans.

Connect with Marcos Viriato:
LinkedIn
Parfin

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Web3 founders and token issuers will hear how GSR grew from crypto market maker to full-lifecycle financial partner across 600 token issuers.

Xin Song, CEO of the 13-year-old firm, explains how listening to founders drove that expansion and why a FINRA broker-dealer license changes what GSR can offer. He also makes the case that tokenized equities in Korea and Japan, not the US, are the overlooked opportunity of the next 12 to 24 months.

Connect with Xin Song:
LinkedIn
GSR

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AI’s next infrastructure bottleneck may not be compute or model architecture at all, but proving that training data is real, legal, and trustworthy, a problem Andrea Muttoni, CEO of the Data Foundation and former Amazon Alexa builder, and Avi Patel, founder of Cloud and chief data officer at the Data Foundation, are tackling from opposite sides of the AI data market.

Muttoni explains why synthetic data still depends on human ground truth, while Patel reveals how unforgiving the market can be when poor-quality or fraudulent data reaches an AI lab, including why one bad dataset can permanently destroy a buyer relationship. They trace the opportunity from a voice collection experiment that generated 5 million submissions in rare languages in two weeks to Trace, an on-chain audit layer that has registered roughly 125 million data receipts with about one billion more committed, while Patel shares a request in which a lab was willing to spend up to $100 million collecting selfies from 100,000 people.

The broader shift is that companies may increasingly discover a second business hidden inside the proprietary data they already generate, as open-source AI models make specialized training more accessible and create demand for datasets that cannot simply be scraped from the internet. For founders, investors, and operators building around AI infrastructure, the deeper question is becoming less about who can collect the most data and more about who can prove exactly where that data came from, who contributed it, and whether a serious buyer can trust it.

Connect with Andrea Muttoni:
LinkedIn
The Data Foundation Website

Connect with Avi Patel:
LinkedIn
Kled.ai Website

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Ethereum treasury strategy for public company founders: Joseph Chalom explains why copying MicroStrategy's debt model for ETH destroys the core structural advantage.

Chalom built BlackRock's fastest-growing ETF to $50 billion before leaving retirement after six weeks to run Sharplink, now the second-largest public holder of Ethereum. His argument is concrete: Bitcoin requires financialization to generate yield because it produces nothing natively, but ETH's proof-of-stake mechanics let permanent capital compound on its own, so layering debt and preferred stock on top doesn't add leverage so much as it adds unnecessary fragility to an already productive asset.

Sharplink holds roughly $1.5 billion in Ether, custodied through Coinbase and Anchorage Digital, audited by KPMG, and fully staked from day one, which Chalom describes as the first Ethereum treasury to reach that milestone. Beyond base staking yield of two and a half to three percent, the team deployed approximately $200 million into a liquid restaking token held within their qualified custodian, and in June announced a $125 million on-chain yield fund with Galaxy Digital: Sharplink contributing $100 million, Galaxy contributing $25 million, targeting outsized but conservative returns Chalom calls "singles and doubles." The result is roughly 48 percent of Sharplink's stock held by institutional investors, which he cites as the highest institutional ownership percentage among Ethereum digital asset treasuries.

Chalom's broader framework for evaluating the digital asset landscape rests on four primitives: stablecoins (third to fourth inning, with $320 billion outstanding and 99.75 percent dollar-denominated), tokenized real-world assets (bottom of the first, a $31 billion market against a $400 trillion potential TAM), decentralized finance as the execution layer, and agentic finance as the earliest-stage wildcard. His institutional comfort test is consistent regardless of fund size: does the network offer trust, security, and liquidity? On that basis he argues Ethereum leads all three categories, pointing to over 55 percent stablecoin share secured on Ethereum's layer one and layer twos, comparable tokenized asset share, and the fact that the chain has operated continuously for eleven years across six or seven independent software clients.

Connect with Joseph Chalom:
LinkedIn
Sharplink
X

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Most enterprises assume their current payment systems work well enough to delay adopting digital assets, but this miscalculation ignores the seismic shift already underway. Bam Azizi, who built Mesh into infrastructure for blockchain payments after selling a cybersecurity company with 2,000 integrations, explains that waiting to adopt blockchain's cost and speed advantages means missing the window to capture tens of trillions in tokenized real world assets projected to move on-chain over the next three to five years. While incumbent payment rails still dominate distribution with billions of users, the ticking clock works against them as traditional institutions like Bank of America and Fidelity launch stablecoins and as AI agents begin generating hundreds to thousands of microtransactions per day, a volume and transaction type that legacy systems cannot economically process. Azizi provides the framework enterprises need to understand why tokenization of real world assets, not just Bitcoin appreciation, will push crypto market cap from four trillion to a hundred trillion, and why the companies that integrate blockchain payment infrastructure now will capture the agent economy and tokenized equity wave hitting in months, not years.

Azizi built his previous cybersecurity company with 2,000 integrations before founding Mesh six years ago. Mesh initially launched as a consumer app called Front that connected brokerages like Robinhood and Coinbase, scaling from zero users to half a million users and over a billion dollars in connected assets. Azizi pivoted Mesh to B2B in 2022 after launching on Product Hunt, ranking number three that day and landing five customers on day one. He predicts crypto market cap will grow from four trillion to a hundred trillion dollars in the next three to five years driven by real world asset tokenization, not Bitcoin price appreciation. Azizi expects the average person conducts two transactions per day while agents will execute hundreds to thousands of transactions daily, with hundreds of billions of agents connected to the internet creating a thousand times economy expansion. He identifies tokenized equity as the next major wave hitting in ten months, with platforms like Kraken, Coinbase, Binance, and Alpaca already moving in that direction. Azizi calls out PayPal as a sleeping giant with 450 million registered users and two trillion dollars in processing volume, possessing all the distribution and infrastructure needed if they move operations on-chain. His hot take for the next 18 to 24 months is that the majority of transactions, whether on-chain or off-chain, will be done by machines and agents rather than humans.

Enterprises gain a framework for understanding that blockchain represents a modern payment rail upgrade offering global reach, instant settlement, and the ability to process microtransactions that legacy systems cannot economically handle. Azizi demonstrates that the compliance and regulatory clarity from the Genius Act and pending Clarity Act remove the primary barriers preventing regulated institutions from embracing blockchain, with Bank of America, Charles Schwab, and Fidelity already launching stablecoin initiatives. The fragmentation across hundreds of chains, wallets, exchanges, and asset types creates the user experience challenge Mesh solves by abstracting complexity so businesses and consumers can move money from point A to point B without thinking about gas fees or network selection. Listeners learn that the grandma test, where crypto becomes simple enough for anyone to tap their phone and pay in a store, represents the accessibility standard required to bring the next billion users and millions of institutions on-chain, unlocking new terra corn companies worth trillions built on this infrastructure wave arriving in months.

Connect with Bam Azizi:
LinkedIn
X
Mesh
Crunchbase

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What happens when a crypto protocol raises serious capital, builds a major ecosystem, and then treats treasury management like a back-office function?

In this episode of High Stakes, host Alex Nwaka sits down with Ben Tsai, Co-Founder and President of Wave Digital Assets, to unpack why passive treasury management can destroy long-term protocol value when volatility hits.

Ben shares how Wave Digital Assets manages digital asset treasuries for protocols including Cardano, Polygon, and Midnight, helping clients execute across native tokens, stablecoin reserves, DeFi yield, lending, borrowing, staking, derivatives, venture investments, and global market structures. He explains what institutional treasury management really means when protocols hold hundreds of millions in digital assets, and why active liquidity, yield, and ecosystem strategy can become mission-critical.

The conversation also explores Asia’s fragmented crypto markets, Japan’s cautious regulatory evolution, Singapore’s shift after FTX and Three Arrows Capital, Hong Kong’s sandbox opportunity, and Korea’s emerging institutional opening. Ben also discusses his role at MetaPlanet, Bitcoin treasury companies, tokenized money market funds, stablecoin regulation, and why the future of crypto finance may depend on turning idle capital into productive capital.

Connect with Ben Tsai:
LinkedIn
Wave Digital Assets

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What are enterprises still missing about stablecoins, and why does that matter for the next phase of digital asset adoption? In this episode of High Stakes with Alex Nwaka, Alex sits down with Chunda McCain, Co-Founder at Paxos Labs, to unpack how stablecoins are moving from simple issuance into a deeper infrastructure layer for payments, credit, DeFi access, and enterprise-grade financial rails.

Chunda shares how his early exposure to Bitcoin, DeFi, and real-world financial access shaped his conviction in crypto, then breaks down the role Paxos and Paxos Labs play in helping enterprises move beyond first-step digital asset access. The conversation explores why many companies misunderstand stablecoin economics, why distribution matters more than issuance alone, and how institutions should think about regulatory clarity, validator infrastructure, data intelligence, and on-chain financial products.

You’ll also hear Chunda’s high stakes hot take for the next 12 months, including why major financial institutions may rapidly expand direct crypto access and why neobanks could become a key distribution channel for DeFi.

Connect with Chunda McCain:
LinkedIn
X (Formerly Twitter)

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Why does institutional capital still hesitate on Solana, even as public blockchain infrastructure becomes more credible to banks, asset managers, and payments companies? 

In this episode of High Stakes, Alex Nwaka sits down with Catherine Gu, Head of Product for Digital Assets at Solana, former leader on Visa’s crypto team, to unpack what institutions actually need before they move meaningful volume onchain. From privacy and compliance to liquidity velocity, stablecoins, and enterprise-grade controls, Catherine explains where Solana is winning, where it still needs to improve, and why the next phase of adoption will depend less on hype and more on infrastructure that institutions can trust.

Catherine shares how her background across hedge funds, Stanford, Visa, and now Solana shaped her view of blockchain as financial infrastructure, not just speculative technology. She breaks down the shift she saw from proof-of-concept thinking to real institutional adoption, points to the signals that changed sentiment around public chains, and explains why tokenized deposits, onchain treasuries, and stablecoin liquidity matter so much in the current market.

The conversation also explores Solana’s institutional roadmap, including privacy tooling, modular design, compliance guardrails, and the role of liquidity in building real network value. Catherine also gives her take on multi-chain strategy, misconceptions institutions still bring into the room, the future of payments, and how AI agents and stablecoins may intersect over time.

Guest: Catherine Gu, Head of Product for Digital Assets at Solana
LinkedIn

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What does crypto have to do before it can truly compete with the legacy financial system? 

In this episode of High Stakes, Alex Nwaka sits down with Aklil Ibssa, Head of Corporate Development at Coinbase, for a sharp conversation on crypto M&A, long-term strategy, regulatory clarity, integration risk, and why the biggest opportunity in digital assets is much bigger than crypto competing with itself. Aklil breaks down how Coinbase thinks about acquisitions, what separates durable deals from headline-driven ones, and where the market could be heading next across payments, on-chain infrastructure, and prediction markets.

Aklil shares his path from investment banking and LinkedIn to leading corporate development at Coinbase, then unpacks how the company evaluates whether to buy, build, partner, or invest. He explains why integration is often the make-or-break factor in M&A, what made recent acquisitions so strategic, and how Coinbase is thinking about becoming a global financial platform, not just a crypto exchange. The conversation also explores stablecoin payments, token capital formation, long-term conviction in Web3, and why patient operators may be the ones who define the next era of financial infrastructure.

Connect with Aklil

🎧 New episodes every Tuesday. Tune in weekly for sharp, no-hype conversations on blockchain, AI, and enterprise innovation.

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