Searching for Mana with Lloyd Wahed

Two years after Circle co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire joined us on Searching for Mana, Lloyd Wahed sits down with Circle President Heath Tarbert to pick up the story.

Quite a lot has happened in between.

Circle has gone public, stablecoins have moved firmly into the financial mainstream and the conversation has shifted from whether this technology matters to how large it can become.

Heath has had a rare view of that journey. Before joining Circle, he served in the White House, chaired the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission and held senior roles at Citadel Securities. Today, he operates at the centre of one of the most important companies in digital finance.

In this episode, Lloyd and Heath discuss the road through crypto winter, Circle’s IPO, the growing competition around USDC and what it takes to turn a long-term vision into a functioning global financial platform.

They explore why new stablecoin entrants may validate rather than weaken Circle’s thesis, why consortium models often struggle, and how regulation is opening the door for stablecoins to move beyond crypto markets and into traditional finance.

The discussion then turns to what happens when AI begins to move money for itself, from Circle’s internal transformation to a world of autonomous agents transacting at a scale and frequency humans never could.

It also becomes a broader conversation about how to build through uncertainty: staying clear-eyed when conditions turn, holding onto conviction without drifting into fantasy, and finding the discipline to keep moving when the outcome is far from guaranteed.

A wide-ranging conversation about money, policy, strategy and the infrastructure that could underpin the next era of finance.

Very special thanks to:

Work on view:

@superlumenary

@0xShiroi

What will drive crypto’s next major cycle: Bitcoin, stablecoins, tokenisation, or something much bigger?

Matt Hougan, Chief Investment Officer at Bitwise, joins Lloyd Wahed to break down how institutional investors are really approaching crypto, why adoption often takes years, and what finally gets capital off the sidelines.

He explains why Bitcoin should be understood as a service, makes the long-term case for a $1 million price, and argues that investors spend too much time trying to call the bottom instead of thinking about where the top could be.

The conversation also explores why advisers and family offices are increasingly focused on stablecoins and tokenisation, who could become the “NVIDIA of tokenisation”, and why crypto-native firms may continue to thrive even as giants such as BlackRock enter the market.

Matt also sets out his conviction that on-chain vaults could become one of the most important innovations in asset management since the ETF.

Beyond the markets, he reflects on his unconventional path into finance, the principles that shaped his career, and the skill at the heart of his success: taking complex ideas, reducing them to first principles, and making them easy to understand.

A wide-ranging conversation on Bitcoin, institutional capital, tokenisation and the future architecture of finance.

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce has spent years arguing that regulators should create clear rules, not make policy through enforcement.

Now, with the CLARITY Act advancing, a more supportive administration in Washington and institutions finally entering digital assets, she believes the industry has a genuine opportunity.

But she also has a warning.

Regulatory clarity alone won’t determine what happens next. Builders will.

In this episode of Searching for Mana, Lloyd Wahed sits down with SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce to discuss why markets work better than central planning, how tokenisation could reshape capital markets, why the SEC should remain a referee, not a participant and what the crypto industry must do to avoid wasting this moment.

They discuss:

A conversation about regulation, innovation and the philosophy that underpins free markets.

Subscribe to Searching for Mana for conversations with the builders, investors and policymakers shaping the future of finance.

Follow on X:

Recorded live at Art Basel 2026, in front of the Zero10 sector at the world's most significant contemporary art fair.

In this conversation, Rani and Lloyd discuss the bank's digital art collection and prize, the question of scarcity and artist career management, what it takes to build lending infrastructure for NFTs, and why the institutions that will matter in this space are the ones that arrived before the market did.

Leander Herzog's Infinite Garden is presented by Nguyen Wahed Gallery at Art Basel 2026, where it wraps the facade of the hall itself.

Last year, Leander was a finalist in the Arab Bank Switzerland digital art prize.

Rani Jabban is Deputy CEO of Arab Bank Switzerland - one of the first private banks in the world to offer institutional-grade cryptocurrency custody to clients. In 2019, when the consensus across major financial institutions was blockchain yes, crypto no, Arab Bank moved the other way. What followed was a years-long bet on digital assets, digital art, and the infrastructure needed to treat both with the seriousness of any other asset class.

Follow on X:

Lloyd Wahed: @LloydWahed

Rani: @RaniJabban

Arab Bank Switzerland: @arabbankCH

Nguyen Wahed: @nguyenwahed

Art Basel: @ArtBasel

Leander Herzog: @lennyjpg

Four conversations from this season of Searching for Mana, woven into one.

Chris Perkins on why Franklin Templeton bet on him to run their crypto platform, and why institutions now have more risk if they're not in the space.

Sidney Powell on Maple's reverse innovator's dilemma against the JP Morgans and Blackstones now circling the Bitcoin backed loan market.

"Getting banks to use blockchain has never been about the technology. If you cannot answer why a bank makes more money by going blockchain, there is no reason for them to adopt it."

In this episode of Searching for Mana, Lloyd Wahed is joined by Alex Buelau, founder of Rayls, the Layer 1 blockchain purpose-built for institutional finance.

After more than a decade building infrastructure for banks and financial institutions, Alex believes the next evolution of blockchain will not be driven by speculation, but by the convergence of traditional finance, tokenised assets, and artificial intelligence. Rayls was built around a simple premise: existing blockchain infrastructure was never designed for the operational requirements of institutions.

The conversation explores why Rayls chose to build a Layer 1 rather than another Layer 2, the importance of instant finality and stablecoin-based gas fees for banks, and why Alex believes the future of crypto increasingly resembles foundational internet infrastructure rather than an alternative financial system.

Alex also shares how Parfin became embedded across major Brazilian financial institutions, why Brazil has emerged as one of the most advanced environments for tokenised finance experimentation, and what it actually takes to bridge institutional liquidity with decentralised infrastructure.

Along the way, the discussion moves into AI agents, the future architecture of financial systems, founder resilience, and Alex’s long-standing fascination with technology trends before they become obvious to the market.

This episode covers why the next generation of blockchain infrastructure will need to balance public liquidity with institutional privacy, how AI could fundamentally change the way value moves across financial systems, and why the biggest opportunities in crypto may ultimately come from making the technology disappear entirely.

Alex Buelau: @x10xalex

Rayls: @RaylsLabs

Lloyd Wahed: @lloydwahed

Please follow and subscribe!

"Maybe the value is created in AI. But the future of ownership is very likely to happen on the blockchain."

In this episode of Searching for Mana, Lloyd Wahed is joined by Boris Revsin, CEO of Tribe Capital, a US-based, multi-stage venture firm managing just under $2.5 billion across crypto, AI infrastructure, and frontier tech. Boris joined Tribe in 2022 to run the fintech and crypto group and has spent the last two years as CEO and GP across all funds, with investments spanning OpenAI, XAI, Kraken, and companies operating at the sharpest edge of the AI and blockchain intersection.

Boris's story began in Russia in 1986, with a midnight escape to the US. That experience forged a worldview on capitalism, risk, and what opportunity actually looks like that runs through everything he builds. Tribe's current conviction is that AI and crypto aren't competing forces. AI centralises value. Blockchain is where ownership accrues. And the firms that understand both will define the next decade of infrastructure.

This episode covers why the next plethora of L1's probably aren't going anywhere interesting, what on-chain agents actually need to function, and why Boris thinks the more important question isn't how AI changes work. It's how it changes everything else.

"A business needs to get bought. Not sold."

In this episode of Searching for Mana - On Location, Malak Alba is joined by Bernard Schmid at the Digital Assets Forum in London, catching him at the centre of the industry he's helping to build. Bernard is Co-Founder of Areta, the leading crypto-native M&A advisory firm by deal count, and spent years at the Blackstones and Deutsche Banks of the world before making a deliberate bet that crypto would eventually need the same professional financial infrastructure that traditional markets take for granted. That moment, he decided, was worth leaving for.

2025 was a record year for crypto M&A, $8.6 billion across 267 transactions, four times the volume of 2024. Bernard has been at the centre of it. From the Kraken-Breakout deal to the first ever private equity acquisition in digital assets, Areta has been advising on the transactions that are quietly reshaping how the industry consolidates.

This episode covers why payments is now the category driving the lion's share of deal activity, what founders consistently get wrong about their own valuation, and why Bernard thinks the most important thing a founder can do before selling is make buyers come to them.

“The wave that we're catching is that all of this is going to shift on-chain and be done with stablecoins over the next 10 years.”

In this episode of Searching for Mana, Lloyd Wahed is joined by Sidney Powell, CEO of Maple Finance, to explore how on-chain credit is evolving into a serious capital markets category.

Maple now manages around $4bn in AUM and has originated more than $20bn in loans since launch. But the deeper story is how crypto lending has changed since 2022: less frontier excess, more risk management, more institutional structure.

Sidney explains how Maple lends to institutions on-chain using stablecoins, why liquid collateral changes the risk profile, and how DeFi can become a source of capital rather than just speculation.

They also discuss stablecoins scaling into the trillions, the application layer thesis, Maple’s partnership with Aave, private credit, macro cycles, AI, and why Sidney believes the next decade of alternative lending moves on-chain.

A grounded conversation on credit, stablecoins, risk, and what it takes to build through the cycles.

Follow Sidney & Maple Finance on X:

Follow Lloyd: @lloydwahed

“Technology is not political. It’s just technology.”

In this episode of Searching for Mana, Lloyd Wahed is joined by Chris Perkins, Head of Franklin Crypto at Franklin Templeton.

Chris’ path into digital assets spans the US Marine Corps, 15 years on Wall Street, and senior roles across crypto, including as President at CoinFund, before stepping into one of the most significant institutional roles in the space.

Following Franklin Templeton’s acquisition of 250 Digital, a CoinFund spinoff housing its liquid crypto strategies, Chris now leads the newly formed Franklin Crypto unit, bringing together crypto-native expertise with one of the largest global distribution platforms.

The conversation focuses on what has changed.

While digital assets are still often framed through volatility and cycles, the more important shift is structural. Institutional capital is moving in, and with it comes a different set of requirements around scale, governance, and distribution.

Chris explains why this moment represents an inflection point, and why the next phase of the market will be defined less by ideology and more by execution.

They discuss:

Chris also reflects on the principles that guide his approach, from operating in high-stakes environments to building within regulated financial systems, and how that informs his view on risk, technology, and long-term market structure.