The AllinCrypto Podcast

Circle debated building its own blockchain for more than four years before it built Arc. Gagan Mac, VP Product at Circle, explains why Arc is designed as an economic operating system for the internet, and why stablecoins could give anyone online the same access to a wallet, a currency and global assets. Then the conversation turns to AI, and why trust may become the real bottleneck when intelligence becomes a commodity.

• Why institutions kept asking who the validators are, and how known validators, dollar-based gas and SLAs answer them

• Arc as a liquidity hub: growing USDC across all chains instead of pulling traffic from Ethereum or Solana

• The Arc token: minted but not launched, meant for network coordination and governance

• Beyond the dollar: about 15 stablecoins from 15 countries on Arc, plus an on-chain FX market

• Why the real retail question is whether crypto can grow your savings, not whether it can buy you a coffee

• Post-quantum cryptography, and blockchains as an audit trail for what AI agents do

Binance was hit by what was called the biggest hack in internet history, and Bitcoin fell only about 6%. What does that resilience say about who holds crypto now, and how close are crypto-native instruments to becoming regulated products for everyday investors?

Jasmin Muelhaupt is Head of Product at 21shares.

The conversation opens with the US midterms and whether they threaten crypto and AI, then turns to market health amid AI bubble fears and why crypto held up after the Binance hack. Jasmin breaks down how the 21shares Anthropic pre-IPO ETP works, built on Binance perpetual futures, a Kaiko reference rate and hedging by parent company FalconX, and why liquidity limits what can be tokenized or productized. It also covers options and Derive, Polymarket, Venice AI and the crypto x AI theme, institutional adoption beyond Bitcoin, DeFi risk and expectations for 2027.

For years, tokenization inside banks was stuck in pilots that never shipped. Ami Ben David, Founder & CEO of Ownera, explains why that is changing, why the real gatekeeper is the bank's risk department and not the technology, and why he thinks the long-term future is public chains.

• From Spice VC to Securitize: tokenizing a fund in the ICO era, and why it's okay to be early as long as you're not too early

• FinP2P and Ownera routers: an open off-chain protocol that connects banks peer-to-peer, with no blockchain or crypto network in the middle

• Bringing the cost of connecting two institutions from $1-5 million and 9-15 months down to zero integration cost

• Need-to-know privacy, why regulated tokens can be frozen, and transparency for the people who need to see it rather than the whole world

• A tokenized collateral sandbox built with GDF, connecting about 50 financial institutions across multiple chains

• Multichain liquidity, public versus private chains, and the road out of 'POC Purgatory' to production in 2026 and scaling in 2027

What happens when a public company's treasury doesn't just hold tokens, but puts them to work? With over 14 million AVAX staked for native yield and operating businesses built around the network, this conversation tests whether the 'DAT 2.0' label is more than a rebrand. Pete Wylie joins the conversation as interim CEO.

The conversation unpacks the 'DAT 2.0' model: a Nasdaq-traded digital asset treasury that holds over 14 million AVAX, stakes it for native yield and, following the MicroStrategy playbook, pairs it with operating businesses that benefit from the Avalanche network. It covers why Avalanche's mix of private and public data appeals to financial institutions, how staking rewards are reinvested, and how existing Bitcoin mining sites are being tested for AI inference. It also weighs how early on-chain adoption still is, DeFi's rough run since the October drawdown, and why AI agents may need fast, low-cost payment rails.

Pete explains:

■ Why staking AVAX for about 5.5% native yield works much like depositing funds at a bank

■ What separates a 'DAT 2.0' from a Bitcoin treasury: yield plus connected operating businesses

■ How excess power at the Redwater Bitcoin mining site is being piloted for AI inference

■ Why the next wave of adoption is expected to be institutionally driven, and why that may be healthier

■ Why AI agents need low-cost, fast, frictionless payment rails, and why crypto plus AI agents is called a gold mine

Is the traditional tech stack already at its breaking point? From AI-driven hacking to drones hitting data centers, this conversation makes the case for tamper-proof, unstoppable code and a serverless cloud built the internet way. Dominic Williams is the Founder of the DFINITY Foundation.

• From Smart Drives in the late 1990s and the 2014 Pebble paper to the Internet Computer as a world computer

• AIware and agentic infrastructure: Multidex, an exchange coded by AI, and a chat-based app builder that has created over 100,000 apps

• Why today's stack breaks, and how Byzantine fault tolerance offers a mathematical guarantee instead

• Cloud Engines for sovereign clouds, OpenSaaS and verifiable AI inference for open-weights models

• Why ICP is misunderstood in Web3, and why many networks' validators sit on two or three hyperscaler clouds

• The 10-year goal: a growing share of a cloud market predicted to reach $2 trillion a year by 2030

Geopolitical fragmentation, a shifting monetary order and the rise of AI are not slowing blockchain adoption down. They are speeding it up. SMQKE joins AllInCrypto to make that case, tracing a line from BRICS payments outside SWIFT to the ISO 20022 altcoins expected to lead the next wave.

• BRICS building a payment network outside SWIFT, India pushing back on Chinese CBDC dominance, and why a fragmenting world needs a neutral, trustless layer

• XRP compared with Keynes' Bancor, and the argument that XRP and XLM replace the settlement system that distributes the dollar rather than the dollar itself

• What WisdomTree, EY, the IMF and Coinbase material say about tokenization on Stellar and how flow-driven payment assets accrue value

• The Clearing House, founded in 1853, picking Quant to power its on-chain tokenized deposit network, and why 2027 is framed as the year everything scales up

• Agentic finance, Hedera as a trust layer for verified AI training data, and ISO 20022 as infrastructure for agentic payments

• Eight ISO-compliant networks, XRP, XLM, XDC, HBAR, Algorand, IOTA, Quant and Cardano, what this means for Bitcoin, and why SMQKE expects the biggest alt season yet

Chapters

00:00 Introduction

01:07 BRICS and the CBDC Power Struggle

06:32 Bancor, Dollar and Stablecoins

11:18 XLM, Stellar and WisdomTree

18:47 How XRP and XLM Accrue Value

24:34 Quant and The Clearing House

30:30 Why 2027 Is the Scale-Up Year

35:03 Agentic Finance and Hedera

44:35 What It Means for Bitcoin

47:46 ISO-Compliant Altcoins to Watch

54:40 The Biggest Alt Season Ever?

1:01:23 Where to Follow SMQKE

What if the biggest threat to traditional banking isn't Bitcoin, but stablecoins?

In this episode of AllInCrypto, Rupert Pickering sits down with Sid Powell, CEO & Co-Founder of Maple Finance, to explore how cryptocurrency could fundamentally reshape the global financial system.

With over $25 billion in loans originated, Maple is at the forefront of institutional crypto lending. But according to Sid, the biggest transformation may still be ahead.

Could stablecoins force banks to offer better interest rates or risk losing customer deposits? Could crypto eventually absorb the private credit industry? And what happens when tens of trillions of dollars in real-world assets move onchain?

In this episode, we explore:

• Why stablecoins could threaten traditional banking profits.
• The potential for a $1 trillion stablecoin market.
• How tokenization could unlock tens of trillions in assets.
• Why Bitcoin is becoming increasingly important as financial collateral.
• How DeFi could transform traditional lending and private credit.
• The rise of AI-powered finance and GPU-backed lending.
• Robinhood, Stripe and the accelerating adoption of blockchain by major financial institutions.
• Why the next phase of crypto adoption could be much bigger than expected.

From Wall Street to decentralized finance, this conversation explores the forces that could transform how money moves, how assets are owned, and how the world accesses credit.

Is traditional finance ready for what's coming?

What happens to global finance when countries stop trusting each other? This episode makes the case that every major crisis has pushed crypto forward, from the 2008 bank bailouts that led to Bitcoin to the COVID money printing that led to DeFi.

Now the breakdown of trust between nations is putting crypto forward as a neutral system the world can transact on. Johann Eid is the Chief Business Officer at Chainlink.

The conversation breaks down Chainlink as the 'invisible center' of crypto: CCIP for moving value across chains, data that underpins DeFi, and CRE for bringing legacy infrastructure like DTCC on chain. It covers why governments and financial institutions are racing to adopt crypto, and how stablecoins and DeFi open up finance to people without reliable access. It also explores why Chainlink complements layer 1s, why auditability makes crypto essential for trustworthy AI, and why billions of mostly private chains are coming.

Could stablecoins make Visa and Mastercard obsolete?

And could blockchain become the essential infrastructure behind AI agents and the next generation of global finance? Antony Welfare, former Ripple CBDC advisor who worked with more than 30 central banks and founder of TrustCBRC, joins AllInCrypto to explain why the real blockchain revolution goes far beyond cryptocurrency speculation.

From the future of payments and the XRP Ledger to tokenization, AI agents and institutional adoption, this conversation explores how blockchain could reshape the systems behind our everyday lives. Antony draws on his experience at Ripple, Oracle and DXC Technology to explain why legacy financial institutions face growing pressure to adapt, why stablecoins could dramatically reduce payment costs, and why public and private blockchains will likely coexist.

The discussion also explores TrustCBRC, an AI-powered platform designed to evaluate real-world blockchain projects and issue verifiable certificates using the XRP Ledger.

When a clearing system that handles about two trillion dollars a day picks its blockchain operating system, what does that mean for the token behind it? After recent announcements pushed QNT from about $61 to about $350, this conversation asks whether Quant is the layer that lets the old financial world merge with the new one.

Apex Crypto Insights joins AllInCrypto to break down the Quant Network thesis. The conversation covers the sandboxes said to use Quant, from the ECB digital euro to Project Rosalind, and why license fees owed only once projects go live could lock up QNT. It moves through the three-layer model for new money, the claim that most CBDCs run on private versions of the XRP Ledger, and a theory about Satoshi.

Then come QNT valuation scenarios set against Solana, Ethereum and Bitcoin, a look at Bretton Woods, the Triffin dilemma and XRP as a neutral bridge asset, and a closing take on Chainlink versus Quant and the outlook for 2027.