Episode 9: Is Crypto Still Relevant in the Age of AI?

Episode 9: Is Crypto Still Relevant in the Age of AI?

The most crypto-friendly US administration in history is in place. Real use cases like stablecoins are scaling fast across the globe. The SEC has stopped trying to sue the industry out of existence… and yet crypto as an asset class is the lagging part of 2026's ripper market, with Bitcoin back to its August 2024 level (hovering below $63,000) and the major altcoins down a lot more. The week of the SpaceX IPO mania, we recorded Episode 09 of Money Moves and dug into this puzzle. In it, we cover where the crypto retail investors actually went. We try to answer whether they are all chasing AI equities now because of the outsized returns seen over the last few years, and whether cryptocurrencies, as an asset class, are still relevant in an age of AI risk assets that can deliver crypto-shaped returns. We all define “crypto” as the tradable asset. A very important distinction, because blockchain, as a technology, has already cemented itself as a core part of financial infrastructure and is working to cement itself as the settlement layer and medium of exchange for agentic finance.

Episode 8: Capital Concentration - The $135B IPO trifecta and what it does to everything else

THREE IPOS, $135 BILLION, AND EVERYTHING ELSE The largest IPO in history was Alibaba in 2014 at $22 billion. SpaceX alone wants to raise more than three times that this Thursday at a target valuation of $1.77 trillion… which would make it the seventh-largest US public company on day one! OpenAI and Anthropic are queued up behind it. There is roughly $135 billion in combined fresh stock the market has to absorb in a few months, across just three companies. The story of capital concentration is a major one here. The top ten companies in the S&P 500 were 40% of the index by weight at year-end 2025, and, through April 2026, 80% of venture dollars went into just 29 companies.  Episode 08 of Money Moves is about what ripple effects happen in the private and public markets when three behemoths are the only thing everyone is talking about.

Episode 7: Permissioned vs. Permissionless: The debate every onchain dollar is making

Sam sets it up as a role-swap, with Dave (the permissioned business operator) arguing permissionless and Ian (the libertarian of the two) arguing permissioned. Dave opens with Marc Andreessen's 2014 New York Times op-ed (the original "declare a truth over the internet" framing) and uses it to argue that the only real innovation in a blockchain is solving one specific cryptography problem. Most of what gets called a blockchain today, he says, is doing nothing of the kind: ❝ A permissioned network of ten banks is going to go nowhere. ❞ Ian counters with what he calls "importing trustlessness." The pricing argument under it is sharper than the philosophy, because public blockchains cost cents in gas and carry billions in brand trust, which makes them a wildly mispriced utility for anyone building new market infrastructure. Sam brings the debate back to the news. SEC Chair Paul Atkins and Commissioner Hester Peirce are advancing a tokenized stock innovation exemption that lets equities be tokenized (potentially without the issuer's consent) and traded on DeFi (decentralized finance) applications. The regulator is drawing the first formal map of where the permissioned and permissionless worlds meet. Both hosts argue their way out of the positions they started with, and Ian's closing line is the one neither of them set out to deliver. Tune into Episode 07 for where the debate actually lands, the SEC ruling that just bent the line, and Ian's closer.

Episode 6: Stablecoin Business Models: Who Captures the Yield?

Why is Circle, a public US company that just IPO'd, racing to launch its own blockchain six months later? Dave makes the case that the headline reason (gas fees, agentic commerce) is third-order, and the first-order reason lands in five words. Who else is going to muscle into the issuance layer in the next twelve months? Anchorage is already dropping native USDC support so it can launch its own stablecoin. Coinbase is incentivizing non-USDC tokens despite being Circle's largest distribution partner. JP Morgan and Bank of America have not entered yet, and the moment they do, Web3 native issuers lose the only moat they had. Is BlackRock's new tokenized treasury reserve fund a niche infrastructure filing, or the start of a $30 trillion fixed income stack on chain? Ian thinks the next stop is mortgages, then investment grade credit, then structured credit, then leverage on top of all of it. The base layer is finally here. Tune into Episode 06 for the five-word answer to question one, the twelve-month timeline on question two, and how fast the rest of the credit curve follows.

Episode 5: To Tokenize or Not to Tokenize?

Two visions of tokenization (the practice of representing real-world assets) are competing in real time, and only one of them delivers on the $19 trillion forecast for the category. The walled-garden version, where every major bank tokenizes its own deposits inside its own four walls, mostly produces press releases because it dresses up an existing database with blockchain language. The permissionless version is the one where BlackRock's tokenized treasury fund (BUIDL) just landed on Uniswap, where someone in Argentina can hold Nvidia stock from a wallet, and where private credit finally gets a marketplace it has never had — and it is the only one that actually rewires market structure. Episode 05 of Money Moves is about how to tell those two apart… and why the answer is mostly a legal rewiring, not a technical one.