The Crypto Tape

Jonathan Shaffer, co-founder and CEO of Fission, joins Frank Chaparro to talk about the missing piece in tokenization: liquidity. Asset managers are lining up to tokenize their funds, but most of those products are still semi-liquid, with quarterly redemption windows and gates. Fission steps in as the buyer, so holders can exit when they want. 

Jonathan walks through how conversations with private credit managers have shifted from "maybe one day" to "which product first," why cross-chain settlement matters when the same fund lives on several blockchains, and how tokenization could unlock liquid private markets for investors around the world. His view is that the U.S. private markets that finance American innovation still run on paper, and that needs to change.

Aya Kantorovich, co-founder and co-CEO of August and Upshift, joins Frank Chaparro and Carlos Guzman to argue that DeFi's addressable market is the $16 trillion of professionally managed money in the US, plus the self-directed investors who trade on apps like Robinhood. Aya explains how $300 billion in stablecoins has left neobanks, fintechs, wallets, and their treasury teams holding idle balances that need yield products in kind, and why those clients start with the T-bill rate and then ask for low, medium, and high risk buckets. She describes how Upshift's revenue has moved from DeFi and ecosystem vaults to exchange, neobank, and wallet earn products plus RWA capital formation, with RWA demand she puts in the billions of dollars. She also covers why she does not trust AI agents with large sums without smart contract guardrails, why she expects vault infrastructure to reach large institutions in 2 to 3 years, and why she thinks asset issuers will eventually run these products in-house rather than outsource them. A conversation about vaults, stablecoin yield, tokenized assets, and how traditional finance comes on-chain.

Frank Chaparro takes The Crypto Tape to SALT Wyoming in Jackson Hole for two conversations with his GSR colleagues. First, Alex Taaffe, GSR’s Chief Revenue Officer, describes how the crowd has shifted from projects and policy to banks and blazers. He explains why one of the slowest stretches of token issuance he's seen could set up the next cycle, and why perpetual futures are becoming a way for investors around the world to get exposure to U.S. stocks and commodities.

Then, Managing Director of Asset Management Andy Baehr takes the temperature of a stalled market. He explains why a low-volume range isn't a reliable floor, why months of call selling have crushed volatility, and why he's watching for an ether-led rally and rising DeFi borrow rates.

Chris Perkins joins Frank Chaparro in his return to The Crypto Tape to talk about building Franklin Crypto inside Franklin Templeton, a firm that has been investing in the space since 2017.

Chris explains why institutions that once took risk by being in crypto now take risk by staying out, and why they need a trusted agent to get in. He describes what crypto is exporting to traditional finance, from 24/7 markets to perpetual futures and prediction markets, and what traditional finance brings back in controls. He makes the case that years of regulatory precedent will be hard to unwind regardless of what happens with Clarity or the next election, and closes with the topic he says no one is talking about enough: post-quantum cryptography, and why crypto will solve it before the rest of the global economy.

Andrew McCormick joins Frank Chaparro for a conversation on The Crypto Tape and shares more on his role leading Chainlink's institutional business after stints at E*Trade, Morgan Stanley and eToro.

Andrew explains why calling Chainlink an oracle company undersells it, and why tokenized equities have become its fastest-growing area. He makes the case that tokenization is a global access story, for investors outside the U.S. and for the roughly 80% of Americans who have never placed a trade. He also shares what has surprised him most since joining: large banks wanting to talk about DeFi, including tokenizing private company stock so holders can borrow against it.

Bhaji Illuminati, CEO and co-founder of Centrifuge, joins Frank Chaparro in studio at RWA Summit in Brooklyn, the tokenization conference Centrifuge launched in 2023.

Bhaji describes how the room flipped from mostly DeFi builders to mostly traditional finance, and why the tokenization playbook flipped with it: asset managers now start with real onchain demand and AUM, and treat operational efficiencies as the long game. She walks through how a $1 billion T-bill RFP from Sky led Janus Henderson to bring its flagship AAA CLO strategy onchain with Centrifuge, why vaults are turning asset managers into onchain curators, and why Centrifuge is proposing to let token holders convert into tokenized equity.

Edward Woodford, founder and CEO of zerohash, joins Frank Chaparro and Slater Santer for episode five of The Desk to describe stablecoin adoption from a seat almost nobody else occupies: the infrastructure layer that banks, brokerages, and fintechs use to offer crypto trading, stablecoins, and tokenization. Stablecoins are now the majority of that business, which Interactive Brokers led a $104 million round into in September 2025 at a $1 billion valuation, alongside Morgan Stanley, Apollo-managed funds, and SoFi. Edward walks through what institutional flow actually looks like, [flow figure or growth rate], and which corridors and use cases produce volume rather than headlines. He explains why the hard part of this business is licensing and compliance rather than technology, which is why fintechs rent the stack instead of building it, what MiCAR authorization changed for operating across jurisdictions, and how the shift from holding a stablecoin balance to funding accounts, settling payments, and spending at the point of sale changes what platforms need underneath. A conversation about the plumbing that stablecoin adoption runs on, from the person building it for the institutions using it.

Robert Leshner, CEO of Superstate, returns to The Crypto Tape to join Frank Chaparro during the RWA Summit for a look at what has changed in tokenization since his last appearance on the podcast in February.

Robert explains why the products gaining traction look retail native and even anti-institutional, why most tokenized stocks are wrappers on brokerage balances several steps removed from the issuer, and why Superstate is focused on the pipes underneath to put the primary security itself onchain. He also makes the case that value will accrue to trading venues rather than token issuers, predicts that three years from now there will be more ways to trade Tesla than at any point in history, and explains why agents or aggregation will have to tame all that choice over the long run.

Hayden Adams, founder of Uniswap, joins Frank Chaparro on The Crypto Tape, where Hayden lays out his core thesis that tokenization is the digitization of value, the same shift the internet brought to information.

He explains why automated market makers win on cost of capital rather than raw efficiency, how "correlated pairs" decouple what traditional markets bundle together in dollars, and why that expands rather than replaces the role of market-making firms. He also gets into what Robinhood chain proved about RWAs and memes, the common misconception about impermanent loss, and why he now describes Uniswap as a liquidity network and distribution engine rather than a decentralized exchange.

Chris Maurice, CEO of Yellow Card, joins Frank Chaparro to cut through the hype on stablecoins and explain where they genuinely change payments and where they don't.

Yellow Card builds stablecoin payment infrastructure across more than 50 countries, giving Chris a ground-level view most of the industry lacks. He argues the "stablecoins fix international payments" story is oversimplified, that the real unlock is in markets where rails and dollar access are broken rather than the US-to-Europe corridors that already work, and that the long-promised remittance revolution keeps stalling because the middlemen pocket the savings. He also makes the contrarian case that banks are allies rather than enemies, with native stablecoin acceptance as the endgame, and explains why the yield fight is really about protecting bank margins. 

Chris and Frank also discuss why stablecoin cards are taking off outside the US, and how stablecoins have finally broken away from crypto in the eyes of investors