The Crypto Conversation

Callan, also known as "Sap" is the Co-Founder of Threshold Labs, the managing team behind Threshold Network's tBTC, a trust-minimized bridge enabling native Bitcoin in DeFi.

Threshold Network is a decentralized infrastructure protocol that leverages threshold cryptography to provide privacy and access control services on public blockchains. It was formed through the merger of two projects, Keep and NuCypher, with the aim of enabling secure and decentralized custody and data privacy. One of its core offerings is tBTC, a decentralized bridge that allows users to bring their Bitcoin onto Ethereum and other EVM-compatible networks in the form of an ERC-20 token that is fully backed 1:1 by BTC.

tBTC is designed to address the limitations of custodial wrapped Bitcoin products, such as WBTC, which rely on centralized entities to hold users' BTC. Instead, tBTC uses a network of randomly selected node operators that collectively manage custody through threshold signature schemes. This structure ensures that no single party can access or move the underlying BTC, enhancing security and decentralization. The latest version, tBTC v2, introduces a scalable and permissionless model, progressively shifting control from human intermediaries to protocol-based guarantees.

Bitcoin DeFi—or BTCFi—is an emerging segment of decentralized finance that aims to bring Bitcoin's liquidity into smart contract ecosystems. Historically, Bitcoin has been underutilized in DeFi due to its limited scripting capabilities and incompatibility with platforms like Ethereum. Bridges like tBTC are key to unlocking Bitcoin's potential in DeFi, enabling BTC holders to participate in lending, yield farming, liquidity provision, and collateralized borrowing—all while retaining exposure to Bitcoin. By offering a decentralized, trust-minimized bridge, Threshold Network positions itself as a foundational layer in this growing ecosystem.

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Staci Warden is the Algorand Foundation CEO, and Dr. Matthew Brigida is Chief Economist at Algorand Foundation. In June, the Algorand Foundation's tokenomics team released a new study questioning the assumption that TVL is a meaningful investment signal. Despite being widely cited as a proxy for legitimacy, the research found that TVL doesn't correlate with token performance, even when adjusted for known distortions like double-counting.

The team analyzed 300+ cryptocurrencies from 2023–2024, simulating weekly long/short strategies based on TVL rankings. The result? No outperformance, no alpha. And no meaningful insight once broader market movements are accounted for.

As Pew reported last year, most Americans still don't trust crypto. If TVL continues to be used as a shorthand for credibility, that only adds noise. This paper adds to the growing push for better metrics in DeFi.

Algorand's mission is to power a world where information has integrity and innovative ideas can scale. The Algorand Foundation supports Algorand's rapidly growing ecosystem by providing a best-in-class developer environment, supporting key infrastructure and setting technical standards, offering comprehensive support to builders and entrepreneurs, and providing the framework for decentralized governance.

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The TVL Study White Paper

The TVL Study Blog Post

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Jeff Hancock is the CEO of Coinpass, a UK-based crypto exchange acquired by OANDA in 2023. He's bringing crypto and traditional finance closer together in a secure, regulated way.

​​Born in London in 2018, Coinpass climbed the regulatory mountain early, securing an FCA crypto-asset registration and then catching the eye of multi-asset heavyweight OANDA, which snapped up a majority stake in August 2023. Now the exchange enjoys the deep pockets and risk-management chops of a global FX giant while keeping its Union-Jack credentials intact.

Coinpass is unapologetically business-first: corporate and SSAS pension accounts, OTC desks, Faster Payments for GBP, SEPA Instant for EUR, and a Fireblocks-secured custody stack. The offering tops out at roughly 18 coins across 50 pairs, with auto-trade DCA tools and a staking "Earn" programme.

As the FCA's May 2025 paper ushers in a tougher regulatory era, Coinpass is already playing the game two moves ahead—fully registered, audit-ready, and backed by OANDA's deep balance sheet. Its curated asset list and institutional-grade spreads may forego meme-coin noise, but they deliver what CFOs and treasurers actually need: transparent pricing, instant GBP rails, and a compliance posture built to glide through tomorrow's rulebook. While other exchanges scramble to retrofit governance, Coinpass stands out as the gold-standard gateway for UK digital-asset professionals—future-proof, rock-solid, and ready to scale.

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Grigore Roșu is a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois and a former NASA engineer, where he developed the K Framework - an open-source "Rosetta Stone" for programming language semantics. A day-one contributor to the Ethereum Foundation, he later founded Runtime Verification, now the leading formal verification company in Web3. In 2023, he founded Pi Squared with the vision of bringing the next million developers to Web3 by utilizing his revolutionary K Framework.

Pi Squared solves the fragmentation and trust limitations of today's blockchain infrastructure by enabling verifiable, cross-chain computation and settlement, so apps, agents, and protocols can interact across ecosystems without relying on bridges, centralized parties, or unprovable logic.

It's the missing trust layer for a modular, interoperable, and enterprise-ready Web3.

Pi Squared's core offering is its Verifiable Settlement Layer (VSL)—essentially a decentralized, programmable foundation that wraps any action (data storage, transactions, computation) into a cryptographically sealed "claim." These claims are verified by a global network of validators, settled via their high-performance FastSet consensus protocol, and become instantly accessible across chains and environments—all without intermediaries or trust assumptions. VSL enables fast, provable, cross-ecosystem settlements—serving AI, blockchains, or any off-chain systems.

Already live on devnet, Pi Squared showcases powerful use cases like cross-chain asset bridging (e.g., via Wormhole NTT), blockchain state mirroring, and auditable AI pipelines via Trusted Execution Environments. Their system dramatically reduces redundant computation in blockchains—one node computes and proves, and everyone else verifies in milliseconds—boosting throughput, slashing energy use, and minimizing vulnerabilities. Think verifiability everywhere—from remote compute and DeFi to AI inference—supercharged by formal-language-backed proofs.

Pi² is stitching formal verification, zero-knowledge proofs, and cross-chain interoperability into one fast, composable layer. No fluff, no trust—just proof.

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Nick Sainato, the Co-Founder of Gamma, has just launched Signals to fix NFT launches. Signals is a first-of-its-kind go-to-market platform that uncovers hidden demand signals and helps determine a fair market price for items within any launch, on any blockchain, on any drop site.

NFT launches are famously chaotic: dummy wallets farm allow-lists, creators guess at a mint price, and traders pray the gas-war gods are kind. Signals flips that script. Built by the Gamma team, the Signals platform lets any collection on any chain list a drop in a neutral pre-launch lobby where real bidders "signal" demand with its in-app Bars points, surfacing a genuine clearing price before a single NFT is minted. In other words, it replaces finger-in-the-air pricing with data-driven price discovery and a transparent view of market appetite. For creators, Signals works like a launchpad that actually understands their pain. Instead of cobbling together Discord bots, spreadsheets and three different mint sites, they spin up one Signals page and let the auction mechanic do the heavy lifting: it "crowdsources a fair market price," shows how many wallets are willing to pay it, and locks those commitments in Bars. That means no more under-pricing your art, no more over-promising on a fat 10k supply, and—because Signals is chain-agnostic—no more rewriting solidity every time you switch ecosystems. The result is predictable revenue and a public demand curve you can point investors (and your community) at with confidence. For traders, Signals "kills the whitelist grind": you don't have to spam Twitter giveaways or write bad haiku in Discord for a shot at mint—just stake Bars during the signalling window and you're in the price-discovery pool. Because the final mint price is the auction's clearing price, everyone pays the same number, eliminating the FOMO-fuelled gas spikes and post-mint dumpage that plague most drops. Add the fact that Signals listings are chain-agnostic and verified by the Gamma marketplace, and you've got a launch flow that feels less like a casino and more like a proper primary market—still speculative, but finally transparent and, dare we say, civilized.

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Shashank Sripada merges institutional rigor with systemic change. After managing $7B+ in assets and advising the White House, he co-founded Gaia to prove decentralized models can scale equitably. Gaia aims to empower anyone—from individual knowledge workers to domain experts—to build, launch, scale, and monetize their own AI agents.

Gaia aims to empower anyone—from individual knowledge workers to domain experts—to build, launch, scale, and monetize their own AI agents. Each agent runs as a Gaia "node," a lightweight, sandboxed runtime powered by technologies like WasmEdge, fine‑tuned open‑source LLMs, embedding models, vector databases, prompt management, a plugin system, and open APIs. This stack can be deployed anywhere (personal devices, cloud, edge), enabling agents that reflect the creator's own style, knowledge, values, and expertise.

Unlike closed‑box SaaS solutions (e.g., GPT‑4), Gaia nodes enable deep customization via fine‑tuning, RAG‑enhanced prompts, schema‑enforced outputs, and domain‑specific knowledge embeddings. This reduces hallucinations, cuts costs, and maintains data privacy. Users can build agents that speak and think like them, tailored to specific domains—far beyond generic LLM capabilities—and can interconnect to ingest external tools, memory systems, or APIs seamlessly.

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This video is brought to you in partnership with Stabull Finance https://stabull.finance, the #stablecoin #DEX on #Ethereum and #Polygon that allows a growing number of fiat-backed stablecoins to be swapped against each other, liquidity pools, and a liquidity mining program. Make your first swap at https://app.stabull.finance or add liquidity at https://app.stabull.finance/pools

Matthew Ainscow is a co-founder of Me3, a web3 engagement and infrastructure platform. Matthew has built partnerships with several of Asia's largest E-sports and GameFi networks with the goal of converting Web2 users to Web3.

In this conversation, Matthew discusses Me3, the innovative AI-powered engagement platform designed for Web3. He shares insights into the challenges of user retention in the crypto space, the technological advancements being implemented in their platform, and the upcoming token launch. The discussion highlights the importance of data analytics and user experience in enhancing engagement and sustainability in the Web3 ecosystem.

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Aliyyah Koloc, a professional racing driver and advocate for autism awareness, shares her unique journey from tennis to motorsports, her passion for art, and her involvement with Raphael Coin. She discusses the challenges and rewards of racing, the importance of tokenization in making art accessible, and her insights on the future of crypto for her generation.

Raphael Coin was founded in early 2025 with the mission to democratize ownership of historically significant fine art. Following the recent authentication and rediscovery of "Recto: Study for the Battle of the Milvian Bridge" by Renaissance master Raffaello, the project was created to enable public participation in cultural heritage through blockchain technology.

Raphael Coin uniquely allows public access and fractional ownership of an authenticated and recently rediscovered Renaissance masterpiece. It combines cultural importance, secure custody, and transparent ownership through blockchain technology.

Raphael Coin offers fractional ownership of a culturally important artwork, the "Recto: Study for the Battle of the Milvian Bridge" piece recently rediscovered. Using blockchain technology, Raphael Coin makes fine art ownership accessible, secure, and transparent, allowing individuals worldwide to become stakeholders in cultural history.

Founded in 2015, Gleec.com started as a comprehensive blockchain ecosystem aiming to simplify and secure digital asset management.

Today, Gleec provides integrated blockchain infrastructure, centralized and decentralized exchanges, crypto cards, secure chat, and banking solutions, all underpinned by strong regulatory compliance. Gleec's secure and licensed infrastructure now also powers innovative projects like Raphael Coin.

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Raphael Coin

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Mounir Benchemled is the founder of Velora, an intent-based crosschain trading protocol that makes complex trading strategies simple and accessible for users.

Mounir's deep expertise in DEX aggregation and intent-based trading has positioned Velora as a leader in the DeFi space. As the platform evolves, Mounir is steering the next stage of growth by focusing on crosschain interoperability and agent-based execution, ensuring the best possible user experience with reduced gas costs, slippage, and revert protection.

Velora's core mission is to simplify access to DeFi by breaking down liquidity fragmentation—aggregating over 160 integrated protocols across Ethereum, BSC, Avalanche, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, zkEVM, and more.

One of Velora's standout features is Delta, a trading layer that shields you from MEV (miner extractable value) issues and rids you of gas costs. Delta uses "Portikus Infrastructure" and a fleet of competing settlement agents to secure best‑execution swaps—without upfront gas fees. On top of swaps, Velora offers on‑chain RFQ (request‑for‑quotes) from vetted market makers, yield optimization tools, and a public API/SDK for advanced integrations—making it a go‑to for DeFi devs and institutional teams. Velora is carving out the middle‑layer of DeFi—powering fast, secure, cross‑chain trades with gasless UX and plug‑and‑play tools for developers and institutions.

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Kody Sale (Head of Product) and Anthony Bertolino (Head of Marketing & Ecosystem) are leading Obol's charge to scale the next generation of infrastructure networks. Together, they're building the largest Decentralized Operator Ecosystem in Ethereum and Web3—powered by Obol's groundbreaking distributed validator technology.

Obol Network is building a decentralized staking infrastructure for proof‑of‑stake networks like Ethereum. Obol enables Distributed Validators (DVs): validator clusters made up of multiple operators who jointly run a validator, each holding partial key shares (via Distributed Key Generation). This setup boosts fault tolerance—if one or two nodes go offline or are compromised, the validator stays operational and the full private key is never concentrated in one place, significantly slashing security risk.

Obol also integrates a rewards distribution mechanism, Obol Splits, that lets cluster participants define on‑chain how staking rewards are split—non‑custodial, transparent, and immutable.

The Obol Stack is a plug‑and‑play framework that sits on Kubernetes and Helm, enabling users to deploy and maintain decentralized infrastructure—like Ethereum validators, full nodes, L2 sequencers, DePIN nodes, AI agents, and more—in an enterprise‑grade but user‑friendly fashion.

Whether you're a solo home operator or part of a global datacenter cluster, the Stack lets you package, version, and deploy your setup via Helm charts—then share or discover them through the Obol App Store. This means no wrestling with Bash, Docker Compose, or fragile scripts—everything's containerised, composable, and ready to scale.

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