The Crypto Tape

John D'Agostino, Head of Strategy at Coinbase, joins Frank Chaparro to unpack the next phase of market structure: tokenized equities, pre-IPO perpetuals, prediction markets, and the move toward a 24/7 "everything exchange."

John argues the market is panicked, not apathetic, and that panic has historically been the buying signal. He shares the framework he developed with economist Nouriel Roubini for separating productive bubbles that leave real infrastructure behind from inert ones that leave nothing, and explains why putting every asset on a common platform actually makes lending safer.

GoQuant Founder and CEO Denis Dariotis joins Frank Chaparro on The Crypto Tape to unpack the plumbing behind crypto's markets. They cover why fragmentation costs institutions money, what cascading liquidations reveal about exchange risk engines, the difference between perpification and tokenization, and why Denis thinks privacy and dark pools are the most underrated opportunity in crypto.

Crypto is in the headlines almost every week, yet the price keeps going nowhere. GSR's Managing Director of Asset Management Andy Baehr joins Frank Chaparro to explain why. They unpack the divergence between crypto's slow money of institutional integration and the fast money of volume and leverage, and why nearly $20 billion in October liquidations still hangs over the market. Andy and Frank also discuss Bitcoin’s maturation into a macro asset, and how that has influenced the Core Three framework behind GSR's actively managed multi-token ETF.

Important Information:
An investment in GSR Crypto Core3 ETF (Ticker: BESO) involves risk, including possible loss of principal. Investors should consider the investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses of the Fund carefully before investing. The prospectus and summary prospectus contain this and other information and should be read carefully before investing: http://gsretps.io/etf/beso

Staking is the process of putting digital assets to work on a blockchain network to receive rewards and enhance protocol security. By helping the blockchain run more smoothly and securely, rewards are earned in the native blockchain token. Potential staking rewards are earned by the Trust and not issued directly to investors.

Asheesh Birla has been building in crypto since 2013, back when there were just a handful of blockchains and Vitalik was still working out of Ripple's offices. Now CEO of Evernorth, the largest actively managed digital asset treasury built around XRP, he joins Frank Chaparro to make the case that the technology is the easy 25% and the real work is connecting blockchains to the wider economy.

They get into why XRP went from "the bank chain" insult to a structural advantage, why stablecoins are blockchain's broadband moment, the coming shakeout in digital asset treasuries after 2025's "summer of debt," and how tokenized equities went from negligible to $25 billion in two years.

A grounded, builder's-eye conversation about tokenization.

Michael Cahill, CEO of Pyth, joins Frank Chaparro to unpack one of finance's most valuable and least understood businesses: market data. 

A former HFT insider, Michael explains how Pyth rallied over 125 of the world's top trading firms to build an alternative data source, why it found no buyers under Gensler, and how onchain venues are now discovering real-world prices when traditional markets are closed. 

Michael and Frank also discuss the convergence thesis, tokenized real-world assets, prediction markets, and why Pyth is choosing to run like a disciplined B2B SaaS company. A conversation about market structure, data, and what it takes to build a real business in crypto.

Rebecca Rettig, Chief Legal Officer of Jito Labs, joins Frank Chaparro to talk through the policy fights that will define DeFi's next chapter.

Rebecca argues that institutional DeFi cannot mean walled-garden DeFi, and that the existential threat to the space is the one-to-one mapping of crypto categories onto TradFi labels. She also reframes MEV as transaction ordering value, breaks down Jito's BAM, and walks through the specific Clarity Act provisions she thinks will unlock institutional participation in permissionless systems.

Ben Fielding, co-founder of Gensyn, joins Frank Chaparro on The Crypto Tape fresh off Gensyn's mainnet launch and the debut of Delphi, its AI-settled information markets platform that headlined the release.

Ben argues machine learning is hitting the same vertical-scaling wall that PageRank hit before MapReduce, and that the answer is rethinking ML from first principles for decentralized hardware. He explains why the crypto "UX problem" gets less urgent the moment agents become the primary users, why there is no real moat in the model itself, and why information markets are the natural evolutionary mechanism for the next generation of AI.

Azeem Khan, co-founder of Miden, joins Frank Chaparro on The Crypto Tape to make the case that privacy is the next institutional unlock, and that without it, the institutions everyone keeps predicting will simply never arrive.

They cover how zero-knowledge tech has matured into something deployable, why the old crypto token playbook has run its course, and what comes after the era of opaque governance tokens and treasury fire-sales. Azeem also lays out the political risk he doesn't think crypto is pricing in.

Chronicle co-founder Nik Kunkel joins Frank Chaparro to break down the convergence of traditional finance and DeFi into what some are calling "neo finance," fresh off Chronicle's just-announced partnership with BlackRock on BUIDL.

They get into what the Resolv USR exploit should have taught the industry about automated pauses and run risk, why most oracles are brittle by design, and how Chronicle reconstructs funds from holdings rather than passively reporting NAVs. Nik also lays out the next RWA wave he's watching, the case for trade finance, and what AI agents consuming structured data via standards like x402 mean for the data business.

Alpaca co-founder and CEO Yoshi Yokokawa joins Frank Chaparro to unpack the tokenized equity market that just crossed $1 billion in custody and tripled in six months, while remaining almost invisible to the average US investor.

They discuss who actually buys tokenized US stocks, why national exchanges may lose their reason for existence once securities trade onchain in stablecoins, what tokenization means for dollar hegemony, and how composability rewrites prime brokerage. Yoshi also makes the case that in an agent-driven world, APIs and MCP servers replace the user interface as the real competitive moat.