The Crypto Tape

Frank Chaparro takes The Crypto Tape to SALT Wyoming in Jackson Hole for two conversations with his GSR colleagues. First, Alex Taaffe, GSR’s Chief Revenue Officer, describes how the crowd has shifted from projects and policy to banks and blazers. He explains why one of the slowest stretches of token issuance he's seen could set up the next cycle, and why perpetual futures are becoming a way for investors around the world to get exposure to U.S. stocks and commodities.

Then, Managing Director of Asset Management Andy Baehr takes the temperature of a stalled market. He...

Chris Perkins joins Frank Chaparro in his return to The Crypto Tape to talk about building Franklin Crypto inside Franklin Templeton, a firm that has been investing in the space since 2017.

Chris explains why institutions that once took risk by being in crypto now take risk by staying out, and why they need a trusted agent to get in. He describes what crypto is exporting to traditional finance, from 24/7 markets to perpetual futures and prediction markets, and what traditional finance brings back in controls. He makes the case that years of regulatory precedent will be hard to...

Andrew McCormick joins Frank Chaparro for a conversation on The Crypto Tape and shares more on his role leading Chainlink's institutional business after stints at E*Trade, Morgan Stanley and eToro.

Andrew explains why calling Chainlink an oracle company undersells it, and why tokenized equities have become its fastest-growing area. He makes the case that tokenization is a global access story, for investors outside the U.S. and for the roughly 80% of Americans who have never placed a trade. He also shares what has surprised him most since joining: large banks wanting to talk about DeFi, including...

Bhaji Illuminati, CEO and co-founder of Centrifuge, joins Frank Chaparro in studio at RWA Summit in Brooklyn, the tokenization conference Centrifuge launched in 2023.

Bhaji describes how the room flipped from mostly DeFi builders to mostly traditional finance, and why the tokenization playbook flipped with it: asset managers now start with real onchain demand and AUM, and treat operational efficiencies as the long game. She walks through how a $1 billion T-bill RFP from Sky led Janus Henderson to bring its flagship AAA CLO strategy onchain with Centrifuge, why vaults are turning asset managers into onchain curators, and why...

Edward Woodford, founder and CEO of zerohash, joins Frank Chaparro and Slater Santer for episode five of The Desk to describe stablecoin adoption from a seat almost nobody else occupies: the infrastructure layer that banks, brokerages, and fintechs use to offer crypto trading, stablecoins, and tokenization. Stablecoins are now the majority of that business, which Interactive Brokers led a $104 million round into in September 2025 at a $1 billion valuation, alongside Morgan Stanley, Apollo-managed funds, and SoFi. Edward walks through what institutional flow actually looks like, [flow figure or growth rate], and which corridors and use cases produce volume rather than...

Robert Leshner, CEO of Superstate, returns to The Crypto Tape to join Frank Chaparro during the RWA Summit for a look at what has changed in tokenization since his last appearance on the podcast in February.

Robert explains why the products gaining traction look retail native and even anti-institutional, why most tokenized stocks are wrappers on brokerage balances several steps removed from the issuer, and why Superstate is focused on the pipes underneath to put the primary security itself onchain. He also makes the case that value will accrue to trading venues rather than token issuers, predicts...

Hayden Adams, founder of Uniswap, joins Frank Chaparro on The Crypto Tape, where Hayden lays out his core thesis that tokenization is the digitization of value, the same shift the internet brought to information.

He explains why automated market makers win on cost of capital rather than raw efficiency, how "correlated pairs" decouple what traditional markets bundle together in dollars, and why that expands rather than replaces the role of market-making firms. He also gets into what Robinhood chain proved about RWAs and memes, the common misconception about impermanent loss, and why he now describes Uniswap as...

Chris Maurice, CEO of Yellow Card, joins Frank Chaparro to cut through the hype on stablecoins and explain where they genuinely change payments and where they don't.

Yellow Card builds stablecoin payment infrastructure across more than 50 countries, giving Chris a ground-level view most of the industry lacks. He argues the "stablecoins fix international payments" story is oversimplified, that the real unlock is in markets where rails and dollar access are broken rather than the US-to-Europe corridors that already work, and that the long-promised remittance revolution keeps stalling because the middlemen pocket the savings. He also makes the...

Kristin Smith, President of the Solana Policy Institute, joins Frank Chaparro on The Crypto Tape for a clear-eyed read on the crypto policy journey. 

Kristin explains why she thinks the CLARITY Act is far from dead, with a bipartisan Senate vote still live for September, and why the SEC and CFTC are building a parallel track using token-offering exemptions to a potential innovation exemption for trading tokenized securities. She walks through the political knot around ethics and the banking lobby's opposition that stalled Clarity, and describes what the Solana Policy Institute adds by putting the protocol layer i...

Carlos Domingo, CEO of Securitize, joins Frank Chaparro on The Crypto Tape for a grounded look at where tokenization currently stands.

Carlos argues that tokenization only needs a sliver of the equities market to be transformational, pointing out that even 2% of a roughly $100 trillion market moving onchain would equal the size of all of crypto today. He explains the sleeper bet Securitize made registering a transfer agent in 2019, why those firms are now the gatekeepers to tokenizing the biggest names, and how the SpaceX IPO-access mess showed the industry the right way to distribute shares. Along the...

Laura Vidiella of VanEck joins Frank Chaparro to share what she's hearing from institutional allocators, and why their read on this market looks nothing like the panic in retail.

Laura leads investor relations across VanEck's family of crypto funds, from early-stage venture to the liquid side, which puts her between founders and the largest allocators in the world. She explains why institutions increasingly see Bitcoin as a discounted asset, why 2021 is better understood as research-and-development money than venture capital, and why the biggest lesson of the October 10 crash was about nomenclature, not leverage. She also walks through...

Ian de Bode, CEO and President of Ondo Finance, joins Frank Chaparro to explain what tokenization unlocks and where the space needs to improve.

Ondo puts traditional financial assets on crypto rails, with roughly $4 billion in total value locked across tokenized treasuries, stocks, and ETFs. Ian believes that tokenized stocks are fundamentally about giving a global audience access to US capital markets, the same way stablecoins gave the world access to the dollar. He argues that the fear that tokenized equities fragment liquidity is overblown, and walks through the collateral problem that still keeps perps from winning...

Nick van Eck, co-founder and CEO of Agora, joins Frank Chaparro and Slater Santer for the inaugural episode of The Desk to unpack how stablecoins are quietly overhauling global finance and disrupting traditional banking. Nick makes the case that traditional banks have shortchanged depositors for decades by offering near-zero checking rates while capturing the Fed funds rate overnight—causing static checking accounts to lose 40% of their purchasing power over twenty years. He breaks down how Agora's AUSD and stablecoin APIs allow embedded finance platforms and enterprise corporates to earn yield backed directly by short-dated U.S. T-bills and overnight re...

Scott Melker, host of The Wolf of All Streets, joins Frank Chaparro for a conversation about where the crypto market currently stands.

Scott breaks down the CLARITY Act at the finish line at what he calls coin-flip odds, why the fight has quietly narrowed to ethics and whether the president can participate in the crypto industry, and how Trump's meme coin reshaped the debate. Scott also discusses why price conversations have gone quiet at the institutional events and that "institutional adoption" so far has meant firms building products for retail rather than buying tokens for their own...

Joseph Chalom, co-CEO of SharpLink and a 20-year BlackRock veteran, joins Frank Chaparro to explain what separates a digital asset treasury that survives from one that blows up.

Joseph makes the case that a productive, yield-bearing asset like ETH changes the entire treasury model, so the goal becomes growing ETH per share rather than accumulating at shareholders' expense. He argues the market has pigeonholed Ethereum, walks through the "scoreboard" of settlement, tokenization, and DeFi activity he says shows it winning, and details the newly announced ETH Labs, a stakeholder-funded home for Ethereum's institutional roadmap that its backers...

Paul Erlanger, co-founder of FOMO, joins Frank Chaparro to talk about building a social trading app where every position, win or loss, is public. 

Fresh off a $75 million Series B, Paul makes the case that retail now sits in the driver's seat of markets, that transparency changes what it means to follow the smart money, and that giving people access to everything onchain from day one beats the old model of listing assets one at a time. 

A conversation about the interface for the next financial system, from a founder building it.

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 Co...

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...

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 Sa...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Rob Hadick, General Partner at Dragonfly, joins Frank Chaparro to dissect why 2025 was one of the most value-destructive years in crypto history despite all the regulatory wins. They discuss the "why token?" era, the death of the middle in crypto VC, and how traditional investors are returning to the space with more discipline.

This conversation provides a blunt analysis of crypto’s current standing within the overall market. This inflection point is a new challenge for founders and investors alike to navigate.

Sal Gilbertie has spent 17 years navigating the ETF approval process. As CEO of Teucrium, he built his reputation launching agricultural commodity products before filing one of the first Bitcoin ETF applications. When his firm launched XXRP, a double-leveraged XRP fund, it hit $550 million in AUM within 12 weeks.

In this episode, Sal walks Frank Chaparro through how leveraged products actually work, why traditional finance is quietly adopting blockchain for settlement infrastructure, and what happens when regulatory clarity finally gives institutions the green light to build on-chain.

This conversation bridges two worlds that are finally converging. If...

Lord James Wharton joins Frank Chaparro to discuss how crypto policy actually gets made in the UK. Lord James Wharton served as MP for Stockton South and later as a Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State before joining the House of Lords. He previously chaired the board of the UK's higher education regulator, giving him direct experience with how regulatory thinking works in practice.

This conversation covers:

Why regulators are risk-averse by design and how that shapes crypto policy

How independent regulatory bodies operate beyond democratic control

What needs to change for the...

VanEck’s Head of Digital Assets Research Matt Sigel  joins Frank Chaparro to discuss Bitcoin's Q4 correction, why miners are structural sellers, where value is actually accruing, and what could keep crypto range-bound through 2026.

This episode provides a helpful breakdown to the true fundamentals driving crypto’s current price action.