TRM Talks

Lewis Rinaudo Cohen, Co-Head of Cahill Next at Cahill Gordon & Reindel, joins Ari, to explain why he calls his practice "machine law," not AI law. It's about the legal questions that arise when autonomous agents, not humans, execute financial transactions at scale.

Ari and Lewis talk about his path from structured and Islamic finance to founding a crypto boutique in 2018 and building Cahill Next with partner Samson Enzer. Why every lawyer is now a technology lawyer. And why conviction, not credentials, separates the lawyers who thrive from those left behind.

They also get into tokenization...

Last week TRM announced Ardence, an AI investigation platform that combines on-chain blockchain data with more than 50 off-chain partner sources into a single picture of risk. In this episode of TRM Talks, Ari Redbord, TRM Labs' Global Head of Policy, sits down with two of the people who built Ardence, Simon Warren and Lexie Nappi, to talk about what it takes to build an AI investigations platform that investigators can trust.

Simon leads go-to-market strategy for Ardence across EMEA and APAC after a career that took him from the British and Australian armies through cyber threat intelligence...

Sanjeev Bhasker was a federal prosecutor, Digital Currency Counsel at DOJ, cyber counsel in the Biden White House, and acting general counsel in the second Trump administration. He is now at K&L Gates. He joins Ari for his second TRM Talks.

Sanjeev tried nearly a hundred cases as a prosecutor and used BSA reporting to trace dark-web crypto cases back through exchanges. At the White House he worked on the GENIUS Act, the AI Action Plan, the one-dollar LLM contracts with GSA, and the post-quantum cryptography executive order. On quantum he is direct: nation states are...

Amy Oldenburg spent 26 years at Morgan Stanley — operations, emerging-market FX, the trading desk, then the firm's global emerging-market investing business — before the bank created a Head of Digital Assets seat and asked her to do it full time. In this TRM Talks, Amy joins Ari to talk about how she leveraged over two decades at the Morgan Stanley to accelerate the firm’s exploration into digital assets.

The conversation moves from bicycle-messenger settlements in India and currency devaluations to why so many of Amy’s former emerging-market FX colleagues ended up in crypto. Amy talks through what she is s...

In this episode, Ari is joined by close friends and two of the most important voices in our space: Rebecca Rettig, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Legal Officer at Jito Labs, and Michael Mosier, founding partner of Arktouros and former acting director of FinCEN.

Rebecca developed deep subject matter expertise as a financial-services litigator working with the earliest DeFi protocols, including an early pitch to Uniswap when the team numbered four people in a Williamsburg loft. Michael came through DOJ, OFAC, and FinCEN, and traces a through-line from protective orders for domestic-violence survivors to cryptography as a...

Australia just rolled out its biggest anti-money laundering reform in two decades — and it didn't just tighten existing rules, it more than doubled the number of businesses AUSTRAC regulates almost overnight, from roughly 19,000 to over 50,000, sweeping in lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, and dealers in precious metals and stones for the first time.

Brad Brown, AUSTRAC's National Manager for Regulatory Operations, joins Ari to walk through what changed, why AUSTRAC redefined digital currency exchanges as "virtual asset service providers" to align with FATF standards, and what that reclassification means in practice for crypto businesses now covering custody, wa...

In 1934, legal scholar Adolf Berle wrote a footnote speculating that someone might one day hold a passive property right in active property — what we'd now call a governance token. He called it a problem for another day. For Teresa Goody Guillén, founding partner of Bellamentis and founder of the legal AI platform Sophie Lex, that day is now, and it's reshaping how she advises clients building in digital markets.

Teresa joins Ari to trace a career that runs from a plaintiff's law firm and a federal clerkship for Judge Urbina of the US District Court for the...

Juan Zarate joined the US Treasury just three weeks before September 11, 2001, and helped build the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI), transforming Treasury into a cornerstone of American national security. He later chronicled that evolution in Treasury’s War, the definitive account of how financial intelligence, sanctions, and economic power became central tools of US statecraft.

In this episode, Juan joins Ari to discuss how the post-9/11 financial architecture still underpins U.S. national security—and how it must evolve for an era of cryptocurrency, AI, and emerging technologies.

Criminals have no compliance officers and no regulators looking over their shoulder. That means their barrier to adopting new technology — including AI — is effectively zero. They don't need a tool to work for five years. They need it to work for the next five hours. Vatsa Narasimha, CEO of ComplyAdvantage, has been watching this asymmetry define the fraud landscape for years, and his answer is a platform built to match it.

Vatsa joins Ari to talk through what building ComplyAdvantage have taught him about fighting financial crime as a network problem rather than a point-in-time compliance exercise.

On this TRM Talks, Ari sits down with the team behind Unchained DEX in the City — three of the sharpest legal minds in crypto and three of his closest friends — for a wide-ranging conversation about the regulatory questions reshaping the industry in real time.

TuongVy Le, Jessi Brooks, and Katherine Kirkpatrick Bos bring their distinct backgrounds as prosecutors, general counsels, and enforcement attorneys to bear on what investor protection, custody, and market integrity actually look like in a market structure with no historical precedent.

The SEC has provided guidance and clarity, the CFTC is emerging as a...

If a sufficiently powerful quantum computer came online tomorrow, every token on every blockchain would be a target — Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana all share signature schemes that pre-date the post-quantum era. The math has been clear since the 1990s. What's been missing is the machine. That uncomfortable truth anchors this week's TRM Talks.

Brett Falk, research faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Crypto and Society Lab, joins Ari to work through what that actually means — why Shor's algorithm threatens every chain, what NIST's 2024 post-quantum standards mean in practice, and why Ethereum is better positioned than...

Brynly Llyr has deep roots in fintech and blockchain — in-house at eBay, PayPal, and Ripple, where she served as one of the first general counsels in crypto, then founding team at Celo, then Head of Blockchain and Digital Assets at the World Economic Forum. Now she’s Deputy Commissioner for Digital Financial Assets at the California DFPI, leading the rollout of the Digital Financial Assets Law, which goes live July 1, 2026, covering exchanges, custodians, stablecoin issuers, and crypto kiosks across the world’s fourth-largest economy.

Ari Redbord, TRM’s Global Head of Policy, sits down with Brynly to talk thr...

Behind every laundered transaction is a real victim, a real crime, and a real reason to do this work well. That conviction has shaped Sophie Bowler's entire career — from her first job working on the EU's Fourth Anti-Money Laundering Directive as an intern in Brussels, to her current role as Global Chief Risk and Compliance Officer at Zodia Custody.

In this conversation with Ari Redbord, Global Head of Policy at TRM Labs, Sophie traces her path from the European Parliament to leading risk and compliance across six jurisdictions.

She unpacks what it really took to se...

Catherine Gu has always been at the center of the shift toward the decentralization of money, a transformation that was once theoretical but is now actively reshaping global financial markets through stablecoins and on-chain infrastructure.

Inspired in part by Hayek’s vision of competing private forms of money, Catherine’s work sits at the intersection of that idea and its real-world implementation. As Head of Product for Digital Assets at the Solana Foundation, she is helping build what is increasingly viewed as the internet capital market, where speed, scale, and global access redefine how value moves. Before join...

When the Bitcoin white paper landed in 2008, most people saw a payment system. Shaul Kfir saw a privacy problem — because he had spent years working on the zero-knowledge proof technology that would eventually make private transactions possible on blockchains.

That instinct shaped everything that followed, including the Canton Network, the blockchain he co-founded that now moves trillions of dollars a month for some of the world's largest financial institutions.

Shaul's path is unlike most in this space. He co-authored libsnark, the seminal zkSNARK library that helped bring zero-knowledge proofs to blockchains, studied under Turing Award wi...

Crypto investigations are becoming a core part of modern policing. From ransomware and darknet markets to fraud and organized crime, digital assets increasingly appear in criminal investigations.

Det. Anoop “Snoop” Dattani of the Regional Organized Crime Unit at West Midlands Police joins Ari to discuss how investigators are adapting. Drawing on nearly two decades in policing and extensive cyber investigative experience, Snoop explains how crypto cases often move in two directions: reactive investigations that begin with a wallet address or victim report, and proactive investigations that start with a small intelligence lead and grow into broader criminal netw...

Chee Kin Lam, Head of Legal and Compliance at DBS Bank — one of the world's first major banks to receive a digital payment token license from the Monetary Authority of Singapore — joins Ari on this episode of TRM Talks.

Chee Kin shares a career spanning 30-plus years across JP Morgan, Standard Chartered, and DBS Bank, and what he learned along the way about people, culture, and getting things done across continents. He walks through DBS Bank's digital-first roots dating back to 2013–2014, how the bank thinks about blockchain as both an emerging asset class and the future of financ...

Privacy and transparency sit at the heart of the digital asset ecosystem. As blockchain technology continues to reshape global finance, policymakers and builders face a critical question: How can financial systems preserve privacy while still protecting against illicit activity?

In this episode, Yaya Fanusie, Global Head of Policy at Aleo, join's Ari to explore the evolving intersection of privacy, national security, and blockchain innovation. Yaya brings a uniquely multidisciplinary background to the conversation. Before working in crypto policy, he spent seven years at the CIA as an economic and counterterrorism analyst, briefing senior US military leaders...

Romance and “investment” scams are not random. They are engineered — built on trust, pressure, and highly scripted manipulation. And while crypto is often the payment rail, the underlying crime is familiar: fraud that targets everyday people and drains life savings.

In this episode, Detective Matt Hogan of the Connecticut State Police and scam survivor Jackie Crenshaw join Ari to walk through how these schemes unfold, how investigators trace funds once they move on chain, and why faster reporting and better education can make a real difference.

Jackie shares her story of meeting someone on a dating...

Kah Kit Yip has spent his career turning bold ideas about the future of money into working infrastructure.

After nearly two decades at Malaysia’s central bank and leading breakthrough initiatives at the Bank for International Settlements, he helped pioneer new models for instant cross-border payments, programmable compliance, and faster, safer FX settlement. Now, as Head of Blockchain and Digital Assets at UOB, he’s bringing those concepts out of policy sandboxes and into production across Southeast Asia.

In this conversation, Ari and Kah Kit explore how interoperable payment rails, wholesale CBDCs, and tokenized assets can...

From the Federal Reserve on 9/11 to Capitol Hill during the 2008 financial crisis, Adam Meinhardt’s career spans some of the most pivotal moments in economic policy. Now, as Head of Public Policy at Chainlink, he's helping shape crypto regulation during a historic legislative push.

In this episode, Adam joins Ari Redbord, Global Head of Policy at TRM Labs, to explore what it takes to engage policymakers, why market structure legislation matters, and how Chainlink is enabling the next generation of decentralized infrastructure.

Key takeaways from their conversation:

Crypto law has matured quickly — and few people have been closer to that evolution than OG crypto lawyer Joshua Klayman. In this episode of TRM Talks, Joshua Klayman, US Head of Fintech and Head of Blockchain and Digital Assets at Linklaters, joins Ari for a wide-ranging conversation on how legal frameworks around digital assets, tokenization, and blockchain-based finance are taking shape in real time.

With nearly two decades of legal experience — and more than a decade working in crypto — Josh walks through how early blockchain work was shaped by skepticism around smart contracts, why the Uniform Commercial Code...

What does the future of crypto look like in 2026? TRM’s global team weighs in.

In this special New Year’s edition, Ari is joined by TRM colleagues from around the world — investigators, compliance leaders, product strategists, and policy experts — to share their bold predictions for 2026.

Across the episode, TRM team members explore:

2025 was the year of stablecoins — and there’s no better person to look back (and ahead) with than Dante Disparte of Circle.

In this Flash TRM Talks, Ari and Dante reflect on Circle’s big year, the passage of the GENIUS Act, shifting US market structure, and accelerating global regulatory alignment.

They also share predictions for 2026 — including why privacy and global coordination will define crypto’s next chapter — and have a great time doing it.

How do you build a forward-looking regulatory framework while keeping innovation moving at internet speed?In this episode, Ari is joined by Kenneth Gay, Chief FinTech Officer at the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), for a wide-ranging conversation on technology, regulation, and the future of finance.

Together, they trace Kenneth’s 21-year journey across enforcement, markets, macro-financial analysis, and hands-on experimentation — right down to spinning up a Bitcoin node to understand blockchain data from the ground up.

Kenneth explains how early explorations such as Project Ubin laid the foundation for Project Guardian, a cross-border sandbox that...

What do Al Capone, the Bitfinex hack, and the largest child-exploitation takedown in history have in common? IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) played a defining role in all of them.

In the latest episode of TRM Talks, Ari sits down with Chief Guy Ficco — the head of IRS-CI — for a wide-ranging conversation on how one of the smallest federal law-enforcement agencies has become one of the most powerful forces in financial-crime enforcement. Chief Ficco reflects on his 30-year career, from his early days as a field agent in New York to leading global investigations that follow money across bord...

As digital assets move into the regulatory spotlight, few have the global vantage point of Tom Duff Gordon, Vice President of International Policy at Coinbase. With experience ranging from banking at Credit Suisse to steering policy at one of the world’s largest crypto firms, Tom offers a rare behind-the-scenes view into how crypto policy is shaped around the world.

In this episode, Tom joins Ari, TRM's Global Head of Policy, to unpack the evolving global crypto policy landscape, from the rollout of MiCA in Europe to new frameworks taking shape across APAC, LATAM, and the Middle Ea...

Detective David Coffey has spent more than 25 years with the Toronto Police Service, tackling everything from violent street crime to complex financial fraud. In this episode, he joins Ari, to unpack the evolving nature of fraud in Canada — and how crypto is changing the game.

Now assigned to the Financial Crimes Unit, Det. Coffey reflects on his journey from divisional beat cop to leading major fraud investigations. From account takeovers to human trafficking links, he shares firsthand how organized crime has adapted its playbook — and why cryptocurrency is increasingly the payment method of choice.

But more...

Stablecoins are transforming how money moves — and nowhere is that shift more dynamic than in Asia. In this episode of TRM Talks, Ari sits down with Yam Ki Chan, Vice President for Asia Pacific at Circle, to explore how stablecoins are powering the next chapter of cross-border payments, trade finance, and digital money innovation.From his early days tinkering with school computers in Chicago to his tenure at the US Department of the Treasury negotiating policy with China’s top leaders, Yam Ki brings a rare blend of policy depth and business execution to the stablecoin conversation.Together they dig...

Over the last decade we have seen a shift from experimentation to implementation in digital finance and few people have been closer to that evolution than Wee Kee Toh, Executive Director and Global Head of Business Architecture for Kinexys Digital Payments at JP Morgan.

Wee Kee joins Ari to explore the arc of institutional crypto adoption — from his early work at the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the BIS Innovation Hub to building JP Morgan’s live blockchain-based payment infrastructure. He shares insights from developing digital payments platforms, and reflects on how early regulatory experimentation laid the...

Stablecoins are having a moment. In this episode of TRM Talks, Ari sits down with Lesley Chavkin, Head of Global Policy at Paxos and former US Treasury official, to unpack the regulatory evolution shaping the future of digital finance.

Lesley shares her journey from building anti-money laundering frameworks in the Middle East, to building at Stellar, to now helping guide Paxos through a pivotal period for stablecoins. Her perspective bridges public service and private sector innovation — making her one of the most thoughtful voices in crypto policy today.

The conversation covers the impact of the GENI...

How did a Wall Street-bound grad become a pioneer in counterterrorism and threat intelligence? In this episode, Josh Lefkowitz, CEO of Flashpoint, joins Ari to unpack that journey — and share critical insights from the frontlines of global threat monitoring.

Josh shares how 9/11 transformed his career trajectory and catalyzed his entry into the national security world. Fast forward to today, Flashpoint supports over 800 global clients with intelligence spanning jihadist networks, cybercrime, and geopolitical threats.

From the rise of AI-enabled fraud to North Korea’s massive infiltration of the Fortune 500 via remote IT workers, Josh details the most...

Former Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Director Steve Francis dedicated his life to public service from a young age, rising to the pinnacle of US federal law enforcement.On this episode of TRM Talks, Steve joins Ari to reflect on a career defined by protecting the financial system, empowering agents in the field, and building innovative enforcement programs that span borders and sectors.Steve understood early that almost every crime is a financial crime and every investigation is about following the money. During Steve's tenure at HSI, cryptocurrency became a bigger part of that equation. Recognizing its growing role in...

Can a crypto-native company become a fully licensed bank? Joey Garcia not only believes it, he has done it.

In this episode, Bitcoin pioneer and Xapo Bank’s Executive Director Joey Garcia joins Ari, to share the story of building a crypto-native bank. From advising government in the early days of Bitcoin in Gibraltar to leading Xapo’s transformation into a regulated financial institution, Joey offers a blueprint for blending digital asset innovation within the rigor of traditional banking regulation.

They explore how Gibraltar’s principles-based approach became a model...

In this special episode of TRM Talks, Ari sits down with Tyler Williams, Counselor to the Secretary of the US Treasury for digital assets and one of the lead architects of last week’s landmark White House report on digital assets.

Ari and Tyler, from inside the historic Cash Room at Treasury, unpack the 163-page report which outlines a forward-looking framework for market structure, stablecoin oversight, illicit finance mitigation, tax modernization, and responsible innovation.

Tyler offers a rare behind-the-scenes look at how Treasury coordinated with the White House, other fi...

This week on TRM Talks, Ari Redbord, Global Head of Policy, TRM Labs, sits down with Nikhil Raghuveera, CEO of Predicate, to talk about the future of compliance in decentralized finance — and why the next wave of policy innovation will be built directly into code.As DeFi matures and regulators sharpen their focus, projects are facing a new challenge: how to meet real-world policy and legal expectations without compromising decentralization. That conversation usually starts with the question — how do you regulate a world without intermediaries? The answer, as Ari and Nikhil explore, is technology.Through its recent partnership with TRM...

What happens when a veteran of traditional finance decides to help shape the future of crypto compliance? In this episode, Kraken Chief Compliance Officer CJ Rinaldi joins Ari Redbord, TRM's Global Head of Policy, to discuss his journey from the the SEC to UBS and Deutsche Bank and finally to crypto compliance at Blockchain.com and now Kraken.

CJ delves into what makes a world-class compliance program in today’s fast-evolving digital asset ecosystem — from hiring top-tier talent to integrating blockchain intelligence and AI.

Key highlights include:

What does effective crypto regulation look like in practice? Ryosuke Ushida, Chief FinTech Officer, Financial Services Agency of Japan (JFSA) joins Ari Redbord, Global Head of Policy at TRM Lab to discuss how Japan became a global leader in regulating digital assets — and what the rest of the world can learn.

From the collapse of Mt. Gox to the containment of FTX's fallout, Japan's regulatory evolution offers key lessons in striking the balance between innovation and investor protection. Ryosuke shares how his journey from engineer to international policymaker shaped his pragmatic approach to crypto, DeFi, stablecoins, and AI...

On this episode of TRM Talks, Ari Redbord sits down with Michael Greenwald — former US Treasury attaché to the Gulf and now Global Head of Financial Innovation and Digital Assets at AWS — to explore the intersection of financial innovation and governments.From representing the United States in high-stakes financial diplomacy to building bridges between policymakers, technologists, and financial institutions, Michael shares his journey and insights on what it takes to create a safer, more connected global financial ecosystem.This conversation unpacks how finance has become a tool of influence, why collaboration is the new currency of trust, and what the p...

On the eve of the most important legislative discussion in US crypto history, Congressman Bryan Steil, Chairman of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology and Artificial Intelligence, joins Ari Redbord, TRM's Global Head of Policy, to discuss the most significant legislative efforts impacting the future of digital assets in the United States.With a market structure bill — the CLARITY Act — moving through the House and the imminent passage of stablecoin legislation in the Senate, Congressman Steil shares insights into the journey that led to this pivotal moment. He unpacks the challenges of regulatory uncertainty, the crit...