The Crypto Tape

Aave founder and CEO Stani Kulechov joins Frank Chaparro for a wide-ranging conversation on the state of DeFi credit, what Aave v4 unlocks, and how AI agents rewire finance from the backend.

They cover the flip from a DeFi liquidity deficit to a surplus, why tokenization is the bottleneck for real-world credit, and why cost structure (not cheap capital) is what DeFi actually sells to fintechs. Stani also opens up on founder health, the worsening short-termism of the crypto attention economy, and why he thinks every person ends up running their own AI farm.

Frank Chaparro sits down with Amy Oldenburg, Head of Digital Asset Strategy at Morgan Stanley, just after the firm went live with its bitcoin trust ETP. Amy has spent 26 years at Morgan Stanley, most recently running its global emerging market investing business, and now oversees digital assets across all three of the firm's major business lines.

They discuss what it means for crypto to graduate from an innovation experiment to core business operations, why tokenization is just the plumbing for a bigger market structure, and the new category of private wealth client Morgan Stanley can now serve: people who built wealth in crypto but had nowhere to take it.

Matthew Fisher, CEO of Katana, sat down with Frank Chaparro following Katana's token generation event. Katana is a DeFi chain incubated by Polygon and GSR, built around concentrating liquidity at the base layer across lending, swapping, and leveraged trading.

In this episode, Matthew breaks down the decision-making behind Katana's TGE timing, the state of the perps market and why Hyperliquid's dominance shapes everything, the borrower shortage that's suppressing on-chain yields across DeFi, and what it means to survive the post-TGE phase when the farming crowd moves on.

Mike Cagney is the Chairman of Figure, a company that has originated more than $25 billion of assets on-chain and built what may be the only liquid non-agency credit market in existence outside of Fannie and Freddie. Before Figure, he co-founded SoFi.

In this episode of The Crypto Tape, Frank Chaparro sits down with Mike to work through the actual mechanics of bringing real-world credit onto blockchain, why the street is now moving faster on RWA than the native crypto community, and what's still standing between DeFi and mainstream scale.

Mike's case is concrete: DeFi is asset-based lending. The framework and technology is built, but the missing piece is a wallet good enough for every day use.Until that gets solved, the ecosystem stays subscale no matter how many assets get tokenized.

Jamyn Edis has spent over 15 years teaching at NYU's Stern School of Business, led data science and AI practices at companies like Take-Two Interactive and Pearson, and is now finishing a book called The Fifth Horseman: AI and Humanity's Day of Judgment.

His argument is that AI is a mirror of us, trained on the entire documented corpus of human knowledge, and reflecting our instincts, desires, and blind spots back at us. Jamyn questions whether humans can hold onto the one thing that still separates us from the AI models: judgment.

In this episode of The Crypto Tape, Frank Chaparro sits down with Jamyn to unpack what the aspect of judgment entails for finance, for media, for governance, and for anyone trying to make decisions in a world moving faster than its ethical frameworks.

Kaledora Fontana Kiernan-Linn co-founded Ostium in 2022 with a thesis that crypto-native traders would eventually want to trade traditional assets, on-chain, from their existing wallets. Three years later, the numbers are speaking for themselves. Ostium did nearly $6 billion in gold volume in the second half of 2025, with gold running at roughly ten times the volume of Bitcoin on the platform.

In this episode of The Crypto Tape, Frank Chaparro sits down with Kaledora to discuss the macro-driven shift in trader behavior, why prediction markets are creating the next wave of active traders, and what it takes to build a product that earns the trust of traders moving serious size without ever feeling like a toy.

They also get into the $10 trillion CFD market Ostium is targeting and the platform’s approach to scaling.

Alvin Hsia, co-founder and CEO of Ventuals, joins Frank Chaparro for a conversation about building perpetual markets for real-world assets and bringing on-chain leverage to a non-crypto audience.

Alvin spent six years at Airbnb before going through DeFi summer in 2020 and eventually co-founding Ventuals, a Paradigm-backed perps exchange built on Hyperliquid. In two months, Ventuals has crossed $100M in cumulative volume with markets on SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, and public sector ETFs.

In this conversation, Alvin breaks down why NYSE's move into tokenized equities is good for on-chain perp platforms, how the weekend oracle problem works and why continuous spot pricing solves it, and why the RWA perp space has a meaningful structural advantage over crypto-native products when it comes to onboarding retail. He also reflects on what DeFi summer produced, which primitives survived, and why he sees perps as the most accessible leverage instrument for the next wave of users.

If you're interested in the convergence of traditional finance and on-chain markets, this episode is worth your time.

Nick van Eck, co-founder of Agora, joins Frank Chaparro for a candid conversation about where stablecoins are headed

Nick spent years backing crypto companies as a venture investor at General Catalyst before co-founding Agora two years ago. Agora issues AUSD and is building infrastructure to help businesses move their operations on-chain, positioning itself as the horizontally neutral alternative to Tether and Circle.

In this conversation, Nick breaks down why banks' real fear isn't stablecoins but the threat to their deposit base, why most tokenized assets are still objectively worse than their traditional counterparts, and why he chose not to launch a governance token — and what that decision has taught him about product-market fit. He also reflects on what he got wrong as a VC that he only understood after becoming a founder, and where Agora is placing its bets over the next six months.

This episode is worth your time if you’re following the direction of where onchain finance is going.

Mike Dudas, founding partner of Six Man Ventures, joins Frank Chaparro for an unfiltered look at crypto venture in 2026.

Mike has been in crypto since 2013. He co-founded The Block, built payment infrastructure at Paxos and Venmo, and has now raised three funds focused exclusively on the application layer. He sat down with Frank fresh off closing Six Man's third fund in a market where raising capital has never been harder.

In this conversation, they get into what separates the funds that survive from the ones that don't, why on-chain adoption metrics are moving in the right direction even as native sentiment sours, and where Mike thinks the real value in crypto will be captured over the next cycle. He also makes the case that most new L1s launching today won't exist in five years, while the apps being built on top of mature chains will.

They also discuss the growing physical security concerns facing crypto founders and what Six Man is hunting for in 2026: stablecoin finance, on-chain truth infrastructure, DePIN, and products that are actually fun to use.

Michael Blaugrund, VP of Strategic Initiatives at ICE, joins Frank Chaparro to discuss the NYSE's plan to launch a new venue for trading tokenized equities against stablecoins.

Recorded inside the NYSE vault, a 1903 building originally equipped with air conditioning to protect paper stock certificates, the conversation explores how blockchain settlement will reshape equity markets.

Michael walks through why instant settlement is fundamentally about capital efficiency, how 24/7 trading could smooth volatility after events like the October 10th tariff announcement, and why ICE is preparing for a future where it competes with DeFi protocols as much as traditional exchanges.