Open Frontier Executive Director Erik Balsbaugh and board member Amanda Wick join Andy Pickering for a wide-ranging conversation on crypto, politics, and the future of digital finance. The discussion explores why digital assets are too important to be left to partisan trench warfare, and why the real promise of crypto has less to do with speculation and more to do with reducing fees, expanding access, and breaking the grip of extractive financial intermediaries. Erik and Amanda make the case that this is ultimately a fight about fairness, affordability, and who the financial system is built to serve.

Why you should listen

Erik lays out the mission behind Open Frontier: to ensure progressive and broader public-interest voices stay engaged in shaping digital asset policy before the space is captured by incumbents and centralized financial power. He argues that crypto and fintech can help restore finance to everyday people by lowering remittance costs, reducing predatory fees, and enabling more transparent, accountable financial flows. Rather than letting digital assets become just another tool for concentrated institutions, Open Frontier wants to push for a democratic financial future—one where the benefits of innovation reach workers, immigrants, nonprofits, and small businesses, not just insiders and early winners.

Amanda brings hard-earned perspective from the Department of Justice, FinCEN, Chainalysis, and Capitol Hill, and offers one of the episode's sharpest reframes: crypto doesn't uniquely create crime—it makes financial activity more visible. She argues that much of the outrage around crypto crime reflects a visibility problem, not a new crime problem, noting that scams, laundering, and illicit finance long predate blockchain. What changed is that crypto put more of it in plain sight. She also takes aim at the media and political tendency to reduce the entire sector to meme coins and scandals, while ignoring the less flashy but genuinely transformative use cases: stablecoins, cheaper cross-border payments, tokenization, digital identity, and financial infrastructure that can return value to consumers instead of extracting it.

The conversation closes on the geopolitical and ethical stakes of the current moment. Amanda warns that stablecoins are becoming a major global channel for dollar access, and that U.S. policymakers risk undermining dollar influence if they fail to regulate intelligently and stay competitive while other jurisdictions move faster. At the same time, both guests address the reputational damage caused by political grift and conflicts of interest in crypto, stressing that corruption should be treated as a governance and ethics problem—not as evidence that the underlying technology should be discarded. Amanda ends with a broader call that goes beyond left versus right: in a world increasingly split between the haves and the have-nots, digital assets may be one of the few tools capable of shifting structural power in finance—if people pay attention before the opportunity is lost.

Supporting links

Stabull Finance

Open Frontier

Andy on Twitter

Brave New Coin on Twitter

Brave New Coin

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