Steven Goldfeder is the Co-Founder and CEO of Offchain Labs, the company behind Arbitrum, one of the leading blockchains. Arbitrum’s flagship blockchain, Arbitrum One, is a leading Ethereum L2 in terms of TVL and liquidity and supports applications across DeFi, DePIN, AI, gaming, RWAs and other verticals. In this conversation, Steven and I discuss Arbitrum’s origins, the use cases that have driven its success so far, and expectations for Arbitrum’s role in the transition of regulated financial a...
Feb 24, 2025•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Laszlo Szabo is the CEO and Co-Founder of Kiln , a staking infrastructure provider backed by 1kx, Crypto.com, Wintermute, GSR, Kraken Ventures, Consensys and others. Diana Biggs is a partner at 1kx, a crypto VC that has led rounds in companies including Arweave, Pudgy Penguins, Rarible, Wallet Connect and many more. In this conversation, Laszlo, Diana and Will Beeson break down the staking opportunity and Kiln’s view of the space and also use it as a jumping off point to explore 1kx’s investment...
Sep 03, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Luca Prosperi is the founder and CEO of M^0, a stablecoin issuance protocol reimagining how money is created. We first connected with Luca in May 2023, shortly after M^0’s seed round. Fast forward a year, and the company has now raised $60 million, launched on mainnet and facilitated the issuance of over $40 million in stablecoins with its initial network participant. In this conversation, Luca and Will Beeson discuss his vision for a new money creation paradigm, institutional product/market fit...
Aug 28, 2024•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Nick van Eck is the co-founder and CEO of Agora , a US-based stablecoin issuer backed by Dragonfly, General Catalyst, Galaxy, Consensys, Wintermute, Flowdesk, Kraken Ventures and more. Agora’s strategy is to build distribution through B2B partners via a revenue sharing model, in which all parties that contribute to Agora’s stablecoins’ success share in the upside. Prior to founding Agora, Nick worked at General Catalyst, a leading Venture Capital firm. Nick’s grandfather started VanEck Global , ...
Aug 06, 2024•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Lex Sokolin is the co-founder and Managing Partner of Generative Ventures, a crypto and AI focused venture firm. Lex also publishes research and analysis at Fintech Blueprint, one of the best fintech, crypto and emerging tech newsletters out there. In this conversation, Lex and I discuss his thesis at Generative Ventures, which invests in the financial infrastructure powering the machine economy. Lex is a deep thinker focused on the leading edges of what’s currently possible. We're lucky to welc...
Jul 18, 2024•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast Bhanu Kohli is the co-founder and CEO of Layer2 Financial, a B2B payments company leveraging stablecoins for faster, cheaper payment processing. Mike Giampapa is General Partner of Galaxy Ventures, focusing on the intersection of crypto and financial services, security & DeFi applications, and developer tooling. In this conversation, Bhanu, Mike and Will Beeson discuss real economy applications of stablecoins, including payments. We compare Layer2’s performance, economics and business model with...
Jun 25, 2024•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Edward Woodford is the Co-Founder and CEO of Zero Hash, a B2B technology and compliance platform that allows companies to embed crypto and stablecoins with a few lines of code and no regulatory overhead. Zero Hash has raised $170 million from investors including Bain Capital, Nyca Partners and Point72, and supports companies like Stripe, MoonPay, Interactive Brokers, Franklin Templeton and many others. In this conversation, Edward and Will Beeson discuss the most interesting crypto and stablecoi...
Jun 11, 2024•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast Regan Bozman is co-founder of Lattice Capital, a crypto-focused VC firm, and an expert in token launches and secondary trading dynamics. Lattice manages $80m across two funds, with a focus on early-stage crypto projects. Prior to founding Lattice, Regan and his partner Mike Zajko worked at CoinList, a leading platform for new token launches operating since 2017. In this conversation, Regan and Will Beeson discuss the current state of retail crypto trading, various interpretations of memecoin ene...
Jun 04, 2024•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Rob Hadick is a General Partner at Dragonfly, a $2.5bn crypto venture fund. Dragonfly’s portfolio is a who’s who of leading crypto projects including Anchorage, Ava Labs, Blur, DYDX, Lido, MakerDAO, Matter Labs, NEAR, Polygon, Starkware and many, many more. In this conversation, Rob and Will Beeson discuss the recent change in tone in Washington regarding crypto, the implications for the industry as crypto goes mainstream, the next 2-3 years of stablecoin market development, investing in CeFi vs...
May 28, 2024•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Anil Hansjee is a General Partner at Fabric, a UK-based blockchain VC. Prior to joining Fabric, Anil ran Corporate Development EMEA at Google and then led PayPal Ventures in the region. He has tremendous experience investing in fintech and payments at the venture, strategic and angel level. In this conversation, we dive deep into payments, covering the existing legacy stack, initial waves of fintech innovation and more recent blockchain and stablecoin-based approaches to improving global commerc...
May 13, 2024•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sunny Parikh is co-founder and Partner at Reflexive Capital, a fundamentals-driven investment firm focused on digital assets across two core strategies: Liquid Trading and Venture Investing. Sunny was previously with Point72, and his partners at Reflexive worked at Soros Fund Management, Thiel Macro and Goldman Sachs. In this conversation, Sunny and Will Beeson discuss Reflexive’s approach to applying ecosystem to web3 venture, how liquid token and venture strategies can be complementary, valuat...
Apr 30, 2024•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jannick Malling is the co-founder and Co-CEO of the investing platform Public.com. Public has raised more than $300M from investors including Accel, Greycroft, Lakestar, and Tiger Global, as well as celebrities like Will Smith, The Chainsmokers, JJ Watt and Maria Sharapova. In Public’s short life, Jannick and the company have experienced the COVID market crash, GameStop, the 2021-22 crypto meltdown and rapid interest rate hikes, all while building a community-led finance app for engaged retail i...
Apr 10, 2024•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Christian Faes is the founder of Faes & Co, a lending business builder and F2 Finance, a US bridging lender writing loans since 2023. Prior to starting Faes & Co, Christian founded, ran and ultimately IPOed LendInvest, a UK mortgage lending fintech. Founded in 2008, LendInvest is an original fintech, having lent more than GBP 6 billion to individuals and property developers to date. In this conversation, we dive pretty deep into the bridge loan a.k.a. short-term mortgage market, the role of tech...
Mar 26, 2024•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dan Kimerling is Founder and Managing Partner at Deciens , an early-stage fintech VC and investor in Chipper Cash , Treasury Prime and many others. Prior to starting Deciens, Dan co-founded Standard Treasury and served as its CEO until its acquisition by Silicon Valley Bank. Standard Treasury was one of the earliest players in what has evolved to become the Banking-as-a-Service space. The company was backed by YCombinator, Andreessen Horowitz, and Index Ventures. After the acquisition, Dan becam...
Feb 20, 2024•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Amias Gerety is a partner at QED with a specific focus on infrastructure, insurtech and payments. Prior to QED, Amias served as the President’s nominee and as Acting Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. In that role, he was the lead advisor to the Secretary on policies affecting financial institutions, fighting to restore order during the global financial crisis and impacting policy in the years that followed. Amias is a recipient of the Alexande...
Feb 13, 2024•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Luca Prosperi is the co-founder and CEO of M^ZERO LABS_ , a team building a new backend for the banking system. Luca is a deep thinking analyst, economist and builder, with a background in institutional finance, alternative and credit investments and more recently DeFi lending and governance. Luca publishes analysis on Dirt Roads , a must read for anyone thinking about the construct and evolution of money and associated topics. M^ZERO sprang into life recently with the announcement of a $22.5m s...
May 22, 2023•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sheel Mohnot is Co-Founder and General Partner at Better Tomorrow Ventures, an early-stage fintech VC currently investing out of its $225m second fund. Sheel is a former founder, having built a tech-first card processor way back in 2010 which was quickly acquired by Groupon. Since 2014, Sheel has been angel investing and, as of 2016, investing full-time. Sheel is an incredible Twitter follow and constant source of information, insight and entertainment. In this conversation, we discuss how finte...
Mar 10, 2023•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast Matt Harris is an entrepreneur and investor and the founder of Bloom Credit, an API platform for credit data access and analysis. Currently, Matt is focused on investing and advising, working with VC-backed founders and advising companies in the credit space. Among other things, Matt is an advisor to Commerce Ventures, writing scout checks and helping the fund make fintech investments. Matt is also an active angel, having invested in 10+ fintech companies including TrueAccord, Karat and HM Bradl...
Mar 03, 2023•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Stephane Lintner is Co-Founder & CEO of Jiko, a new take on the money storage and transaction layer in banking, a.k.a. checking accounts and cash management. Jiko was founded in 2016 with the mission of providing consumers and businesses with direct access to spendable T-Bills, combining all the benefits of checking accounts with the safety and, depending on the economic cycle, yield of treasuries. Jiko has raised $89m according to Crunchbase, including $40m in October . Jiko offers accounts dir...
Feb 24, 2023•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast Matt Brown is a venture capitalist and Partner at Matrix Partners. Matt is a founder and operator turned investor, having started two software companies, both backed by Matrix, and then led product for AfterPay in the US in the lead-up to its acquisition by Square, now Block. Matt’s second company, Bonsai, is a vertical SaaS company for micro businesses which evolved from a pure software company into a fintech through the incorporation of financial products, before embedded finance was a househo...
Feb 17, 2023•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Chris Dean is the co-founder & CEO of Treasury Prime, a leading US banking-as-a-service platform fresh off a $40m Series C raise. Treasury Prime is a software company that connects sponsor banks to customer facing fintechs and by doing so powers bank accounts, cards and money movement. Unlike others in the banking-as-a-service space, Treasury Prime describes itself as building a network of interoperable sponsor banks and customer-facing fintechs in a ground-up approach to Open Banking in the US....
Feb 09, 2023•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jared Franklin is an investor at Costanoa Ventures. Costanoa is a seed-stage VC focused on fintech, data and developer infrastructure, applied AI and security, specifically B2B. The firm has $1.5b under management across seed and growth funds, including its $225m fourth seed fund. Prior to joining Costanoa, Jared worked in product across fintech and crypto for BillMeLater, PayPal and BlockFi. In this conversation, Jared and I discuss his experience transitioning from operating to investing, the ...
Feb 02, 2023•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast I’m joined by fintech and web3 luminary Lex Sokolin , Head Economist at ConsenSys and author of the Fintech Blueprint , for a discussion about the embedded finance value chain. As listeners know, this is a topic of great interested to me, and I was happy to have the opportunity to dig into it with Lex in a conversation that we’re releasing through both of our platforms. In this conversation, Lex and I take stock of the BaaS and embedded finance space in a moment of market dislocation to see what...
Dec 11, 2022•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) has been the subject of much excitement in fintech over the past few years, together with the related but more general concept of embedded finance . It powers companies like Chime, Robinhood and Coinbase and can include products like checking, savings, debit cards, credit cards, lending and more. In this episode, we read an essay analyzing the BaaS value chain, which we argue is not currently in equilibrium and predict will evolve. Read the article here: https://reban...
Nov 13, 2022•13 min•Transcript available on Metacast Rex Salisbury is the Founder of Cambrian and GP of Cambrian Ventures . Rex is a key figure in the Fintech ecosystem, having started Cambrian as a product meetup in 2015 and ultimately growing it into a community of 15,000 newsletter subscribers, 5,000 meetup members, 1,300 founders and now an early-stage venture fund. Along the way, Rex spent two years at a16z as a partner on the Fintech team, backing companies including Deel and Tally, according to TechCrunch . Though only having just closed th...
Aug 26, 2022•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast Marieke Flament is CEO of the NEAR Foundation. NEAR is an emerging layer 1 blockchain specifically optimized for usability, along with speed and security. NEAR was founded in 2018 to improve on aspects of layer 1s then in existence. In its short history, NEAR has built an extremely strong institutional backing and vibrant developer community. NEAR has raised an impressive $530m+, according to Crunchbase , from an incredible list of investors including Tiger Global, FTX Ventures, Jump, Alameda, a...
Jul 08, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Giuseppe Stuto is Managing Partner of 186 Ventures, a $37m seed fund launched in late-2021. 186 has made 10 investments since inception, following on from over two dozen angel investments Giuseppe and his partner Julian made over the past few years. Across angel and seed investments, Giuseppe and 186 have invested in UiPath, Chainalysis, Ponto and dozens more. Prior to starting 186 Ventures, Giuseppe founded Fam, a group video app that was acquired by DraftKings. In this conversation, Giuseppe a...
May 27, 2022•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast It’s great to be back after taking nearly a year off from regular content to build and launch BELLA . The break wasn’t really planned, but between launching the business, having a son and moving to LA all while dodging COVID, it was unavoidable. But just because we weren't publishing, doesn’t mean we weren’t going deep on fintech. The team and I built and launched BELLA in less than twelve months, and we’re aggressively scaling it now. In the background, I've continued to trade views and break d...
Oct 05, 2021•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, we’re joined by Shamir Karkal, co-founder of Simple, the first digital bank in the US, and now co-founder of Sila. Founded in 2009, Simple was the original digital bank, conceived and built to give people more control over their money. After a few successful years, Simple was acquired by BBVA for $117m, under whose ownership it operated until early-2021, when it was shut down. Simple was loved by its users and mourned following it’s closing, in what was a sad moment for fintech. Today’s b...
Apr 21, 2021•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, we’re joined by Viktor Nebehaj, Co-Founder of Freetrade , a free stock trading platform in the UK. Founded in 2016 and launched to the public in 2018, Freetrade has grown to over 500,000 users in just over two years in the UK alone. For the full backstory, check out our episode with Founder Adam Dodds from February 2019, available at bankingthefuture.com. In this conversation, Viktor takes us behind the scenes at Freetrade over the past few weeks, during the Reddit-fueled runups in Gamest...
Feb 15, 2021•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
