Unblock'd

The industrial age was forged in coal and oil. The age of artificial intelligence is being forged in electricity, and there isn’t enough of it. Data centers now demand gigawatts from a grid that makes new connections wait five to ten years.

Shin Gomi, Senior General Manager of Data Center and Energy Management at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, joins Dr. Jemma Green to unpack what it will take to power the age of intelligence, and who pays if we get it wrong.

In this episode:

• The three bottlenecks holding back AI power: interconnection queues, transmission and generation supply
• Why on-site power alone can’t economically deliver five nines reliability
• Why gas turbines paired with battery storage get financed first, and where SMRs fit
• Rising household electricity bills, data center tariffs and citizen backlash
• Co-location, behind-the-meter generation and who will operate it
• Virtual power plants, AI-based frequency control and workload shifting
• Modular data centers, labor shortages and soaring build costs
• Energy security, national security and Shin’s warning for the decade ahead

Guest: Shin Gomi, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries

To know more, visit https://www.mhi.com/

...................................................................

Unblock'd podcast with Dr. Jemma Green

For more information on Dr. Jemma Green

Visit: https://www.powerledger.io/

Or connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jemmagreen/

Annabelle Huang, co-founder of Altius Labs, explains why Robinhood, Stripe and Circle buy blockchain infrastructure instead of building it, and what AI pulling young talent out of crypto means for DeFi.

Annabelle spent a decade moving from Deutsche Bank's FX options desk to AirSwap on early Ethereum to co-founding Amber Group, and now builds full stack, high performance chains for crypto applications at scale through Altius Labs. Dr. Jemma Green asks her where blockchain infrastructure still trails traditional finance, and Annabelle says the gap is risk management and how chains connect to the players in financial markets.

Topics covered:

- Why large companies partner or acquire instead of building a chain in-house, and how that cuts time to market from years to weeks or months

- Tokenized AMC stock versus options: venues, margin rules and offshore wrappers

- Why perp DEX failures trace back to oracles and liquidation engines more than chain speed

- Privacy, transparency and decentralization after a decade of building

- Nasdaq's move toward near 24 hour trading, prediction markets and what stays on-chain

- Women in crypto, conviction and management style

...........................................................................

About the guest:

Annabelle Huang is co-founder of Altius Labs, which builds full-stack blockchain infrastructure for applications that want to own their chain.

Altius Labs: https://www.altiuslabs.xyz/

Annabelle on X: https://x.com/_annabellehuang

.................................................................................................

Unblock'd podcast with Dr. Jemma Green

For more information on Dr. Jemma Green

Visit: https://www.powerledger.io/

Or connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jemmagreen/

Aya Kantorovich on Institutional DeFi, Tokenized Assets and Raising a Seed Round the Week FTX Collapsed | Unblock'd Aya Kantorovich co-founded August and Upshift, which give institutions access to DeFi with counterparty risk they can underwrite. Her seed round closed the same week FTX collapsed.

In this episode, Dr. Jemma Green talks with her about institutional DeFi, tokenized real world assets, stablecoins, DeFi security and what it takes to run two companies as a new mother. Aya explains why she left FalconX to build on-chain, why DeFi still has no true prime brokerage, and how Upshift vaults now sit inside Kraken's qualified custody so institutions can earn yield on idle Bitcoin and ETH without leaving the platform.

She also covers composability, tokenized treasuries as collateral, why market makers matter for tokenization, and why she thinks accredited investor rules are out of date. In this episode

• How Hack VC doubled down after FTX, and why Aya calls FTX an opsec failure rather than a blockchain failure
• Why DeFi still lacks true prime brokerage, and how Morpho, Aave and Kamino are closing the gap
• Kraken's kBTC receipt token and how bankruptcy-remote qualified custody limits hack risk
• Build or partner: why exchanges buy readiness instead of spending 12 months on vault infrastructure
• Stablecoin vaults for remittances, payments and treasury management
• Composability, explained with tokenized money market funds as collateral
• Why accredited investor thresholds miss the point, and what AI agents mean for them
• The Drift hack, human attack surfaces and delayed settlement as a security layer
• Motherhood, AI agents and running two companies
• Upshift as the first major vault provider on Solana
• The bets Aya is making that the market thinks are too early: regulated crypto infrastructure and AI everything

About guest:

Aya Kantorovich is co-founder of August and Upshift. Know more here. https://www.upshift.finance/

Unblock'd podcast with Dr. Jemma Green

For more information on Dr. Jemma Green

Visit: https://www.powerledger.io/

Or connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jemmagreen/

Lisa Emme spent a decade in finance and private equity before co-founding Frontier AI lab Inversion. In this episode of Unblocked, she breaks down why the real AI conversation has already moved past chatbots into architecture, control, and autonomous agents.

Emme explains why bolting AI onto workflows built for humans produces no real ROI, and why the next shift, from multi-agent systems to fully autonomous AI, will restructure entire departments rather than individual tasks. She argues Europe's dependence on foreign frontier models is a strategic risk, points to the model access restrictions under the Trump administration as proof, and calls for the continent to build its own foundational AI infrastructure before the gap becomes unclosable.

Topics covered:

• Why enterprise AI adoption is stuck at the surface level, and what AI-native restructuring actually requires
• The shift from agentic to autonomous AI, and what it means for finance, procurement, and marketing functions
• Why Emme believes the AI infrastructure buildout is a bubble, and which layer she expects to pop first
• The case for Europe building sovereign AI models instead of depending on US and Chinese labs
• World models, defensibility, and why frontier labs eating the application layer is a five-year risk for most AI startups
• Career advice for professionals with only a few reskilling cycles left before AI reshapes their industry

Guest: Lisa Emme, co-founder, Inversion Lab

Unblock'd podcast with Dr. Jemma Green

For more information on Dr. Jemma Green

Visit: https://www.powerledger.io/

Or connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jemmagreen/

-------------------------------------------------------------

Produced by: Podcasts Done For You

View this episode on YouTube @PodcastsDoneForYou_clients

Telco is quietly having its AWS moment.

For decades, wireless carriers have carried the full weight of building coverage themselves: towers, real estate, hardware, maintenance, tens of billions of dollars a year in capex per carrier. Helium Foundation CEO Scott Sigel joins Unblock'd to explain how a tokenized, community-built network is turning that fixed cost into usage-based infrastructure, and why it's already partnering with AT&T, T-Mobile.

We get into how HNT tokenomics actually work, why Helium walked away from token buybacks, and why the network's biggest win might be that a major part of 3.5 million daily users have no idea a blockchain is involved at all. Scott also breaks down how AI-driven data surges could bring Uber-style dynamic pricing to wireless, what's next as Helium expands into Mexico, Brazil, and the UK, and the emergency deployment that got thousands of phones connected after a hurricane knocked out power on the US East Coast.

Visit here to know more about Helium:

https://www.helium.foundation/

https://www.helium.com/

......................................................................

Unblock'd podcast with Dr. Jemma Green

For more information on Dr. Jemma Green

Visit: https://www.powerledger.io/

Or connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jemmagreen/

-------------------------------------------------------------

AI already sounds exactly as convincing as a lawyer or a financial analyst, whether it's right or not. Ahmed Rashad, founder of Perle AI, spends his career finding where it breaks before someone trusts it with a decision that matters. Jemma Green sits down with him to unpack model collapse, preference collapse, and why he flatly rejects the AI industry's bet that humans eventually become optional. Highlights:

• Why he calls today's AI a college freshman who just finished a survey course and thinks they understand everything
• Why Perle pays its global contributor network in stablecoins and runs on blockchain, and how that flips the industry's usual overhead-to-contributor revenue split
• Why OpenAI shutting down Sora proves that model capability alone doesn't protect a company against better-distributed competitors
• What building Perle has cost him personally, and why his only strategy is "build and sell"

To learn more about Perle AI, visit. https://www.perle.ai/

Unblock'd is hosted by Dr. Jemma Green, founder of Powerledger, one of the world's leading blockchain-based energy trading platforms. Subscribe for conversations at the intersection of Web3, crypto, AI, and the real economy.

For more information on Dr. Jemma Green

Visit: https://www.powerledger.io/

Or connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jemmagreen/

Neil Chatterjee built Andrena from a Princeton rooftop into a wireless ISP serving 4m+ users across. Now he's scaling that model globally with Dawn, a decentralized wireless protocol on Solana that lets anyone beam high-speed internet from a single antenna to a quarter million homes for $10K.

In this episode, Dr Jemma Green and Neil dig into why fiber's three-to-five year payback period collapses to one-to-two years with wireless, how new 6GHz spectrum unlocked by the FCC is bigger than what gave us Wi-Fi and Bluetooth combined, and why the tokenization of physical infrastructure is headed toward RWA-style financial engineering rather than inflationary rewards.

They also cover how Dawn complements Starlink in emerging markets, why building owners are starting to treat internet like tap water, and what capital formation through DePIN actually looks like when you tighten the loop between deployment and yield.

............................................................

Neil Chatterjee founded Andrena out of Princeton University to compete with Comcast and Verizon using wireless technology. He then built Dawn, a Solana-based protocol turning internet bandwidth into a decentralized, tradeable commodity covering 4 million+ households across the US, Ghana, and Latin America.

Learn more about Dawn Internet here. https://www.dawninternet.com/

........................................................................................

Unblock'd podcast with Dr. Jemma Green

For more information on Dr. Jemma Green

Visit: https://www.powerledger.io/

Or connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jemmagreen/

Richard Brown is the CEO of R3, the company behind the Corda blockchain, one of the most widely deployed permissioned blockchains in institutional finance. In this episode, Richard explains why R3 has pivoted from private enterprise blockchain to building on-chain distribution infrastructure for real-world assets, and why Solana is where that bet is being placed. We cover:

• Why $300 billion in stablecoins are earning near-zero yield, and what's actually blocking the fix
• How Corda enables private institutional networks to connect to permissionless chains
• The Corda protocol: what "packaging off-chain yield for on-chain investors" actually means in practice
• Why Solana has overtaken Ethereum in RWA growth rate
• The compliance-first approach to RWA distribution, and why the gray-area strategy doesn't work for R3
• The "mustard problem": how curation, not choice, will decide who wins RWA distribution
• Digital Asset Treasuries (DATs), what MicroStrategy-style vehicles actually are, and where the model breaks

What it means that banks are finally treating crypto as a normal business line Richard has been in this space since before most institutions were allowed to say the word Bitcoin in a meeting. His perspective on how much has changed, and how much hasn't, is one of the most grounded takes you'll hear. R3: https://r3.com

Unblock'd podcast with Dr. Jemma Green

Unblock'd is hosted by Dr. Jemma Green, founder of Powerledger, one of the world's leading blockchain-based energy trading platforms. Subscribe for conversations at the intersection of Web3, crypto, AI, and the real economy.

For more information:

Visit: https://www.powerledger.io/

Or connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jemmagreen/

In 2022, Terra Luna collapsed and billions left the crypto ecosystem overnight. For most builders, it was the end. For Arnold Lee, it was a forcing function: if this technology has a point, what is it? His answer was Sphere Labs, a B2B cross-border payments platform that uses stablecoins as internal settlement infrastructure while keeping the experience invisible to end users. Today Sphere processes billions in annual volume across 60 people, serving fintechs and trade finance companies in markets where traditional correspondent banking fails. In this conversation with Jemma Green, Arnold covers:

• Finding Bitcoin in middle school, farming online surveys for gift cards, and why he thought it was a loyalty points system tied to a website
• How Sphere differs from Stripe, Circle, and every other stablecoin payments company, and why the distinction matters for the $40 trillion B2B cross-border market
• Why stablecoins are not a crypto product, they are a payments product that happens to use crypto rails
• The systemic risk nobody is modeling: dollar-denominated stablecoins expanding globally as a vampire attack on local monetary sovereignty
• Why AI agents exploiting each other in adversarial onchain environments is not a hypothetical, it is an engineering problem happening now
• What the GENIUS Act actually changes versus what the industry thinks it changes
• The "slowly then all at once" dynamic in frontier payments markets that will be obvious in twelve months and is invisible today

Arnold Lee is a CEO of Sphere Labs, a fintech infrastructure company building stablecoin‑powered global payments rails for institutions and fintechs.

Unblock'd is hosted by Dr. Jemma Green, co-founder and CEO of Powerledger.

For more information, visit: https://www.powerledger.io/

Or connect the host on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jemmagreen/

Most people didn't choose their currency. They inherited it.

In this episode of Unblock'd, Dr. Jemma Green sits down with Ryne Saxe, Founder of Eco, to talk about what stablecoin infrastructure actually looks like at scale, why currency choice could be the most underpriced idea in crypto, and what it means to build toward optimism.

Eco started as the first full-featured stablecoin neobank, backed by a16z, Founders Fund and Pantera Capital. After getting choked out of the US banking system, Ryne rebuilt the company from the ground up as infrastructure for stablecoins. Today Eco runs on Solana, routing stablecoins across chains for fintechs, issuers and institutions.

In this episode, we discuss:

• How Eco built the first stablecoin neobank and why they shut it down
• The technology they built but never got to use
• Why stablecoin routing is the problem nobody talks about
• What $32 trillion in settled volume still gets wrong
• Why institutions are moving faster than anyone knows
• Currency choice as a risk mitigator for emerging economies
• What it means to build toward optimism when the system keeps saying no

Key Quotes from the episode:

"Money flows like fluid dynamics. If you give it the opportunity, it will choose the path of least resistance, lowest cost, fastest clearance." — Ryne Saxe

"Money is a collective choice and clearly a lot of us are forced into the currency we chose at a young age because we live in a particular place." — Ryne Saxe

"If you're an early crypto builder, you have an opportunity to build in a way that bends that outcome toward optimism." — Ryne Saxe

About Ryne Saxe

Ryne Saxe is the founder and CEO of Eco, a stablecoin infrastructure company routing digital dollars across chains and markets at scale. Eco is backed by a16z, Founders Fund and Pantera Capital and is integrated with Solana, among other major chains. Before Eco's infrastructure pivot, Ryne built and launched the first full-featured stablecoin neobank in the US. He studied physics and law before going all in on crypto in 2018.

Find Ryne: @rynesaxe on X | Learn more about Eco: eco.com

ABOUT Unblock'd:

Unblock'd is hosted by Dr. Jemma Green, co-founder of Powerledger and one of the leading voices at the intersection of energy, blockchain and Web3. Each episode goes deep with the builders, founders and thinkers shaping the decentralised future.

....................................................................................................................................

For more information on Dr. Jemma Green

Visit: https://www.powerledger.io/

Or connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jemmagreen/