The Crypto Tape – Why Tech is Only 25% of Crypto’s Future with Asheesh Birla

The Crypto Tape – Why Tech is Only 25% of Crypto’s Future with Asheesh Birla

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 debt," and how tokenized equities went from negligible to $25 billion in two years. A grounded, builder's-eye conversation about tokenization.

The Crypto Tape – How Onchain Markets Are Rewriting the $100B Data Business with Michael Cahill

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 SaaS company. A conversation about market structure, data, and what it takes to build a real business in crypto.

The Crypto Tape – Why Walled-Garden DeFi Never Works, and the Policy Fights That Actually Matter with Rebecca Retting

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.

The Crypto Tape – Why There's No Moat in the Model, and the Coming AI Data Center Hangover with Ben Fielding

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 next generation of AI.

The Crypto Tape – Privacy is the Next Meta, and the Old Token Playbook is Closed with Azeem Khan

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.