Jack Chong is co-founder and CEO of Checker, a stablecoin liquidity network connecting FX banks, payments companies, and neobanks across emerging markets.

He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss why cross-border stablecoin payments are still broken, and how Checker is building the infrastructure layer to fix it.

Chong's path from Hong Kong to Oxford to a language school in Jordan to building stablecoin rails in New York and Latin America is not a straight line, but it explains exactly why Checker is built the way it is: global product, local execution, regional investors with boots on the ground.

In its first 12 months, the network processed over $3 billion in payment volume.

Chong breaks down the Brazil-China corridor, where most cross-border business payments still run through informal brokers, and makes the case for why Brazil's VASP regulation arriving in Q4 is a pivotal moment for any institution that wants to offer stablecoin products.

He also floats an intriguing idea: stablecoins as the conduit that opens the BRL carry trade, long a Wall Street macro favorite, to crypto natives and retail investors.

David Z. Morris is a financial journalist and author of Stealing the Future, a post-trial account of the FTX collapse and the effective altruism ideology behind it.

He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss what the criminal trial revealed that earlier books missed, why Michael Lewis's account functionally serves as a defense of the fraud, and how the ideology that shaped Sam Bankman-Fried continues to circulate under new names.

Morris was part of the CoinDesk team that broke the story and later covered the trial for Protos.

Topics include the SBF truther movement, speculative but documented questions about Sullivan & Cromwell's intelligence connections, Caroline Ellison's story, stimulant culture at FTX, and how effective altruism has rebranded as "abundance" and "effective accelerationism."

Morris argues that EA gave SPF an ethical framework that explicitly justified stealing customer funds - and that the same logic is still being sold to engineers in Silicon Valley today.

Luiz Octavio Gonçalves Neto is the founder and CEO of DUX, a company building financial infrastructure for the creative economy in Brazil.

He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss how DUX uses invoice factoring and blockchain-based liquidity to serve a $2.5 trillion global sector that traditional banks have largely ignored.

DUX buys receivables from creative economy companies, marketing agencies, event producers, music studios, and creator agencies, paying them upfront instead of waiting 90 days for big brands to settle.

The company has done R$182 million in volume and is targeting R$1 billion by year-end.

Luiz covers how its Web3 liquidity platform lets global investors deploy stablecoins into Brazilian private credit, why blockchain serves as an anti-fragile capital backup, and what's next as DUX launches a neobank and prepares a rebrand.

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