The Index Podcast

Most tokenized stocks are wrappers, which means there are more parties in the chain than most people realize. Marc Ryan, co-founder and CEO of Spout Finance, breaks down what you are really trusting when a stock goes on chain.

In this episode of The Index Podcast, Marc, a former tech investment banker, explains how Spout Finance is bringing a prime brokerage style product to Solana, why overnight gaps shape how the platform handles risk, and why he thinks Wall Street is warming up to Solana.
This is the unglamorous side of tokenized stocks that most people skip.

🚀 In this episode, we cover:
🔍 What you're really trusting when you hold a tokenized stock: issuers, wrappers, and custodians
🌍 Why tokenized stocks open US markets to people in emerging economies
🧮 How Spout Finance's options-based model works, explained in plain English
🌙 Why overnight gaps and thin after-hours liquidity shape how the platform handles risk
🗽 Is Wall Street warming up to Solana? What Marc hears from institutions in New York
⚖️ Why Marc thinks building on an EVM chain is the riskier bet
📜 What tokenized stock regulation could mean for the whole market


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🧑‍💻 Marc Ryan (X): https://x.com/0xmryan
🔗 Marc Ryan (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/marc-ryan/
🌐 Spout Finance (Website): https://spout.finance
🐦 Spout Finance (X): https://x.com/SpoutFi

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Ryan Carson taught a million people to code at Treehouse. Now he runs Untangle almost entirely on his own, with a fleet of AI agents, and says all technology is about to be worth almost zero.

In this episode of The Index Podcast, the four-time founder explains why his first idea was a total dud, how Untangle pivoted from consumers to an AI paralegal for divorce lawyers, and how an AI called Grace finds what the other side missed.

This is what building a company looks like when product market fit and distribution matter more than the technology itself.

🚀 In this episode, we cover:
⚖️ How Untangle pivoted from helping consumers to building an AI paralegal for divorce lawyers
👁️ Meet Grace, the AI with the "eye of Sauron" that runs 90-minute forensic analysis on a case
🔨 Why Ryan says all technology is almost going to be worth zero, and what matters instead
🤖 How his agent R2 cold emailed law firms and landed the first meeting
☁️ Why he ships dozens of pull requests a day from his phone with cloud agents
🧠 Why agents are still amazing and stupid at the same time
🛰️ Ryan's breakdown of a wild story about AI agents teaming up through a hidden message board

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🎙️ The Index Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@theindexpodcast
🧑‍💻 Ryan Carson (X): https://x.com/ryancarson
🌐 Ryan Carson (Website): https://ryancarson.com
⚖️ Untangle (Website): https://untangle.us

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97% of comments on business pages never get a reply. Hank Leber, co-founder of Stanify, says that is the biggest missed opportunity in social media, and he built an AI to fix it.

In this episode of The Index Podcast, Hank explains how Stanify hides toxic comments without the troll ever knowing, drafts replies in a brand's own voice with a human in the loop, and turns millions of comments into business insights.

This is what happens when a company stops treating its comment section like a liability and starts treating it like a goldmine.

🚀 In this episode, we cover:
💬 Why 97% of comments on brand pages go unanswered
🙈 How Stanify hides toxic comments without the troll knowing
🚪 The lobby analogy: why social media needs a private room, not a screaming match
🎙️ How Stanify learns a brand's voice in 15 seconds
🧑‍💼 Why humans stay in the loop instead of an auto-posting hallucination machine
📊 Why Stanify is really an insights and data company, not just AI automation
🤖 What happens when AI agents start talking to brands on behalf of customers

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🌐 Stanify (Website): https://stanify.ai
🐦 Stanify (X): https://x.com/stanify_ai

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Yahia Bakour kept getting angry emails from big companies about bad data quality. Instead of panicking, he treated them as a signal, killed his other projects, and went all in on one product.

In this episode of The Index Podcast, the founder of Context.dev, backed by Y Combinator, explains how a web data API for AI agents went from a first customer that took a month to 400 customers, and why a team of four runs its DevOps with AI agents.
This is what finding product market fit looks like when there is no data, only noise.

🚀 In this episode, we cover:
📧 How angry customer emails became the signal to kill every other project and go all in
🌐 How Context.dev turns any website into an API with a single schema
⚡ Why scraping 100,000 URLs takes minutes with Context.dev instead of a day on your own machine
🆓 Why free credits beat a paywall when it comes to churn
🤖 How a team of four uses AI agents as its DevOps
🛰️ The monitors feature that had almost 500 monitors created within 20 minutes of launch
🏁 What Y Combinator's outlandish two-week goals actually feel like

🔗 Follow & learn more:
🎙️ The Index Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@theindexpodcast
🧑‍💻 Yahia Bakour (X): https://x.com/mynameisyahia
🔗 Yahia Bakour (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/yahia-bakour/
🌐 Context.dev (Website): https://context.dev
🐦 Context.dev (X): https://x.com/getcontextdev

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Evan Schnidman, head of Fidelity Labs, believes the hardest problem in technology today isn't intelligence, it's identity. In this episode of The Index Podcast, Evan explains why verifying who or what you're transacting with is the key to unlocking agentic commerce at scale.
This is what happens when a Harvard trained game theorist who sold his last company builds central-bank grade prediction models, and now runs the innovation lab inside one of the biggest financial companies on earth.

🚀 In this episode, we cover:
🕵️ Why Evan believes identity, not intelligence, is the hardest unsolved problem in tech
🏢 What Fidelity Labs actually is: a venture studio building inside an 80 year old financial giant
🤖 How agentic commerce could let agents pay each other for a single data point at a time
📜 How Fidelity built the first fully modern transfer agent in three decades
🔓 The real story of an AI agent that escaped its sandbox by finding a zero day vulnerability
🎭 Why AI generated impersonation scams are becoming an identity crisis of their own
🏦 Why Fidelity is betting on digital assets and alternative investments converging

🔗 Follow & learn more:
🎙️ The Index Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@theindexpodcast
🔗 Evan Schnidman (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/evan-schnidman/
🌐 Fidelity Labs (Website): https://fidelitylabs.com
🐦 Fidelity (X): https://x.com/Fidelity

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Robert C. Martin, better known as Uncle Bob, wrote Clean Code. Now he says the days of buying software products are waning, and he built a word processor in 20 minutes to prove it.

In this episode of The Index Podcast, the creator of Swarmforge explains why he now calls his own AI agent swarm a failed experiment, why reading agent-written code slows you down to human speed, and why programmers who master agents will be more in demand than ever.

This is what more than 60 years of programming sounds like when the 
whole game changes.

🚀 In this episode, we cover:
🛒 Why Uncle Bob says the days of buying software products are waning
⚡ How he built a Scrivener-style word processor with an agent in 20 minutes
🧪 Why he calls Swarmforge, his own AI agent harness, a "failed experiment"
🦌 Alex's Claude Code vs Codex A/B test that built an elk hunting app
👀 Why reading agent-written code slows you down to human speed
📈 Why he thinks demand for programmers will go "through the roof"
🎓 How to onboard junior programmers: treat them like an agent first

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🎙️ The Index Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@theindexpodcast
🧑‍💻 Uncle Bob (X): https://x.com/unclebobmartin
🛠️ Swarmforge (GitHub): https://github.com/unclebob/swarm-forge
📚 Clean Coders (Website): https://cleancoders.com
🌐 Uncle Bob (Website): https://cleancoder.com

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Chris Perkins, head of Franklin Crypto at Franklin Templeton, thinks the quantum computing threat to crypto is actually its biggest tailwind. In this episode of The Index Podcast, Chris explains why the race to build post quantum cryptography could be led by crypto itself, and what that means for the $500 trillion secured by public key encryption today.
This is what happens when a Franklin Templeton executive, a CFTC advisor, and a former Marine sit down to explain why the end of encryption as we know it might be the best thing that ever happened to crypto.

🚀 In this episode, we cover:
⚛️ Why Chris thinks quantum computing is crypto's biggest tailwind, not its biggest threat
🔐 Why $500 trillion in assets secured by public key encryption is suddenly at risk
🏦 Why SWIFT took 7 years just to upgrade a messaging protocol, and what that means for post quantum migration
🏴‍☠️ Inside privateers, the new executive order letting white hat hackers hunt crypto scammers
📜 Why Franklin Templeton, an 80 year old asset manager, got into crypto back in 2017
🏛️ Chris's inside view from the CFTC's Global Markets Advisory Committee on tokenized collateral
🥤 Why regulation forces consolidation, and why AI could end up as a Pepsi and Coke duopoly

🔗 Follow & learn more:
🎙️ The Index Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@theindexpodcast
🧑‍💻 Chris Perkins (X): https://x.com/perkinscr97
🌐 Franklin Templeton Digital Assets (Website): https://digitalassets.franklintempleton.com
🐦 Franklin Templeton Digital Assets (X): https://x.com/FTDA_US

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Chris Perkins, head of Franklin Crypto at Franklin Templeton, thinks the quantum computing threat to crypto is actually its biggest tailwind. In this episode of The Index Podcast, Chris explains why the race to build post quantum cryptography could be led by crypto itself, and what that means for the $500 trillion secured by public key encryption today.
This is what happens when a Franklin Templeton executive, a CFTC advisor, and a former Marine sit down to explain why the end of encryption as we know it might be the best thing that ever happened to crypto.

🚀 In this episode, we cover:
⚛️ Why Chris thinks quantum computing is crypto's biggest tailwind, not its biggest threat
🔐 Why $500 trillion in assets secured by public key encryption is suddenly at risk
🏦 Why SWIFT took 7 years just to upgrade a messaging protocol, and what that means for post quantum migration
🏴‍☠️ Inside privateers, the new executive order letting white hat hackers hunt crypto scammers
📜 Why Franklin Templeton, an 80 year old asset manager, got into crypto back in 2017
🏛️ Chris's inside view from the CFTC's Global Markets Advisory Committee on tokenized collateral
🥤 Why regulation forces consolidation, and why AI could end up as a Pepsi and Coke duopoly


🔗 Follow & learn more:
🎙️ The Index Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@theindexpodcast
🧑‍💻 Chris Perkins (X): https://x.com/perkinscr97
🌐 Franklin Templeton Digital Assets (Website): https://digitalassets.franklintempleton.com
🐦 Franklin Templeton Digital Assets (X): https://x.com/FTDA_US

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Ben Ungvari, CMO of Raydium, the Solana exchange that clears the majority of tokenized equity trading, explains why the 9:30 to 4 stock market is a relic of a world where you had to physically stand on a trading floor.

In this episode of The Index Podcast, Ben breaks down how SpaceX's IPO traded on Raydium before most retail investors could touch it anywhere else, and why 24/7 trading is quietly becoming the new normal.

This is what happens when the exchange that survived two bear markets by never chasing hype ends up clearing more stock volume than the NASDAQ on certain days.

🚀 In this episode, we cover:
🏛️ Why the 9:30 to 4 stock market is a relic of a world where you had to physically stand on a trading floor
📊 Why 63% of tokenized stock trading on Solana settled outside market hours in August
🚀 How SpaceX's IPO traded on Raydium before most retail investors could touch it anywhere else
💰 How Raydium cleared over $1 trillion in volume and $370 million in revenue in five years
🐕 The Trojan horse trick that pairs meme coins with tokenized stocks to get people invested
🌙 What actually happens when you trade a tokenized stock at 2 AM on a Sunday
🔮 Why Ben thinks 24/7 trading is going to feel completely boring in five years


🔗 Follow & learn more:
🎙️ The Index Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@theindexpodcast
🧑‍💻 Ben Ungvari (X): https://x.com/ben_ungvari
🔗 Ben Ungvari (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/benungvari/
🌐 Raydium (Website): https://raydium.io
🐦 Raydium (X): https://x.com/Raydium

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Jake Brukhman, founder and CEO of CoinFund, predicts we'll train a 400 to 500 billion parameter AI model on a decentralized network within the next six to nine months, with no data center required.
In this episode of The Index Podcast, Jake breaks down why decentralized AI training is becoming the real counterweight to centralized AI labs, and why token incentives might be the missing coordination layer for the next era of intelligence.

This is what happens when a crypto investor who called decentralized training two years ago before anyone believed it comes back to explain why it's actually happening now.

🚀 In this episode, we cover:
🚀 Jake's bold prediction: a 400 to 500 billion parameter model trained on a decentralized network within 6 to 9 months
💰 Why open source AI models don't have a business model, and why decentralized AI training does
🔓 Why cutting access to Fable 5 was a wake-up call for enterprises relying on centralized AI labs
🖥️ How training on a swarm of consumer hardware could actually be cheaper than a data center
💸 Why a trillion dollar inference market has almost no room for open models
🌐 How token incentives could crowdsource $100 million worth of compute in a single weekend
🏢 Inside CoinFund's bets on Pluralis, Bagel, Gensyn, and Prime Intellect


🔗 Follow & learn more:
🎙️ The Index Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@theindexpodcast
🧑‍💻 Jake Brukhman (X): https://x.com/jbrukh
🌐 CoinFund (Website): https://www.coinfund.io
🐦 CoinFund (X): https://x.com/coinfund

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