Episode 11: Meet Your Host, Samantha Lewis

Episode 11: Meet Your Host, Samantha Lewis

To wrap up Season 1, we're shaking our structure up. We’re releasing three Meet the Host episodes for you to get to know us beyond our hot takes on stablecoins, IPOs, and crypto markets. First up is our dynamite VC, Sam! Ian and Dave grill her for an hour on her path into venture, how she picks deals at Mercury Fund, and what separates the venture funds that survive a decade from the ones that don't. Sam grew up in a small town in New Mexico in a fifth-generation ranching family with two entrepreneur parents. She started a food company while still in college (it now supplies all the green chili to Torchy's Tacos), built and sold a franchise business to fund business school at Rice, briefly tried commercializing a deep-tech project for energy and defense, and ended up running deep-tech and blockchain investing at a family office co-investment group called Goose Capital until her old Rice VC professor called her about a new role at Mercury. She joined Mercury in December 2020 as the firm's blockchain partner, and today she leads about 40% of Mercury's portfolio at the convergence of blockchain, AI, and traditional financial services.

Episode 10: The First Real Test of Tokenized Equity

It flooded our newsfeeds. On Friday, June 12, SpaceX became the biggest IPO in history… $75B raised, ~$2T market cap, an instant top-ten US public company. On the same morning, crypto exchanges (Binance, Bybit, and others) had taken in roughly $557M in stablecoin orders from users who wanted exposure through tokenized SpaceX shares… and had to refund all of it, because their issuer couldn't get the IPO allocation. The kicker? By the end of that same week, the SpaceX perpetual futures contract was the second most-traded pair on Binance, behind only Bitcoin, doing roughly $8B a day. Talk about volume! In the days after the SpaceX IPO mania, we recorded Episode 10 of Money Moves to unpack what just happened in the world of tokenized equity. We dig into the distinct buckets the category now lives in, what worked in the SpaceX trade, what didn't, and where the tokenization layer creates value (vs. where it's basically a marketing layer on infrastructure that already works). One distinction we kept coming back to: there's a real difference between a tokenized equity (a real security wrapped in a token) and a perpetual future on an equity (a synthetic cash-settled bet on the price). That difference separates the institutional trade from the retail one, and it matters more than the SpaceX-week headlines made it sound.

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.