Chad Barraford is a co-founder and the technical lead of THORChain, the cross-chain decentralized exchange that lets users swap native assets — real Bitcoin for real Ethereum — without wrapping, bridging or trusting an intermediary. He found crypto in 2017 while traveling, having sold everything he owned, and built a blockchain from scratch as an academic exercise on the theory that the best way to understand a thing is to construct it from zero. He met his co-founder at a Cosmos hackathon in Berlin in 2019; the first lines of THORChain were written there, and the token launched a week later.

THORChain spent late September in the middle of crypto's loudest argument. After attackers took roughly $387.5 million from Bitget on 24 September, portions of the proceeds were routed through THORChain into Bitcoin, and Bitget CEO Gracy Chen made a public, formal request that the protocol refuse service to the attacker addresses. The answer was no — though Chad's first move in this conversation is to reject the premise of the question. It was not his answer, because he does not own, operate or control THORChain. There is no mechanism in the code base to block a wallet or a transaction, and never has been. Even if the community wanted one, validator consensus takes between three days and two weeks to reach a two-thirds majority, by which point a swap observed an hour ago is long settled. To make blocking practical you would have to install an admin key and redesign the protocol around centralization — at which point, as he puts it, you have rebuilt traditional finance on a different technology stack and he is no longer interested in the problem.

The obvious counter is that THORChain's own node operators did pause the network in May, when a flaw in its threshold signature scheme let an attacker drain $10.7 million from one of six vaults and the protocol went dark for 39 days. Chad's distinction is between protecting the protocol and policing its users: validators on any chain have a security obligation to the network they are paid to secure, which is why Bitcoin's own miners forked away the value overflow bug in August 2010 after someone minted 184 billion coins out of nothing. A halt is not a selective freeze. What genuinely puzzles him is the singling out — six or more DEXs handled Bitget-linked flows, Uniswap among the venues in the broader conversation, and nobody asks Bitcoin or Ethereum to reject tainted transactions. On where responsibility actually sits, he is blunt: stolen funds have to exit to dollars eventually, and that exit runs through centralized exchanges, which are the entities that can stop it and have not always chosen to.

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Cris Blanco is chief strategy officer at Beldex, the privacy-first layer one that began in 2018 as a fork of Monero and now runs a suite of privacy applications for messaging, browsing, networking and payments. He has spent more than 15 years across Web3, frontier technology and digital platforms, working at founding-team and senior-leadership level on go-to-market, ecosystem strategy and partnerships. Most recently he was part of the founding team at Humanity Protocol, where he helped scale testnet adoption to more than three million users in 90 days.

Why you should listen

Blanco has moved from a project about proving who you are to one about keeping that private, and he argues the two are the same problem. His work on identity convinced him that people want to prove specific facts about themselves without exposing everything else, and that privacy has to be part of a system's architecture from the start. He applies the same logic to crypto itself. Blockchains solved verification without a middleman, he says, but verifying that a transaction is valid does not require publishing everyone's balance, salary and coffee purchases to the world permanently.

That view explains why Beldex builds a whole stack rather than a single app. Blanco points out that privacy fails at the weakest layer: an encrypted chat tied to a phone number, a hidden IP address undone by a public payment. So alongside private BDX payments, Beldex offers BChat for messaging without a phone number or email, BelNet as a decentralized VPN, the Beldex Browser, and a naming service for human-readable addresses. Blanco says BChat accounts for roughly two thirds of the ecosystem's 1.5 million installs, which he reads as evidence that messaging, not payments, is the easiest way to bring non-crypto users into privacy tools. On the tension between privacy coins and regulators, he argues that banks and hospitals hold sensitive data without publishing it and still comply with the law. Exchanges and fiat gateways carry the compliance obligations, and users should be able to disclose specific information to specific parties. Beldex has published a MiCA white paper to that end.

AI, he argues, makes the case stronger. People already hand AI assistants their documents and private thoughts, and as businesses route payroll and payments through agents the exposure grows. Blanco says Beldex is testing encrypted agent-to-agent communication as a next product. In the hot take round, he describes success in ten years as the point where nobody talks about privacy because it has become as standard as HTTPS, and explains why rereading Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics feels different in the age of AI alignment.

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John Lilic is co-founder and chief strategy officer of Tria, a self-custodial neo-finance platform for spending, trading and earning across chains. One of crypto's longest-serving builders, he worked at the Bitcoin Center in New York City in 2014 before joining ConsenSys as one of its first employees, spending six years helping to build the Ethereum ecosystem.

Why you should listen

Most neobanks ask users to hand over their assets. Tria's pitch is that you can have the one-tap convenience of a fintech app without doing so. Lilic explains how the product routes assets across chains while leaving the user in custody at all times, so money can move from an Earn vault to a card top-up to a trading position on Hyperliquid or Decibel without Tria ever holding it. He argues this is more than a philosophical distinction. Self-custody has let Tria grow in Korea and Japan, markets where offering custodial products has become increasingly difficult, and where supporting many chains matters because communities such as XRP holders are so large. He also makes the case that when users move funds to themselves rather than deposit into a custodian, they keep control over when a taxable disposal occurs.

The larger idea, and the one Tria is taking to institutions, is that any company with a large audience can now become a financial company. Composable on-chain infrastructure means a streaming service, a marketplace or a community app can offer its users wallets, cards and tailored rewards without building a bank from scratch. Lilic walks through the music platform Lissen, which is launching on Tria's infrastructure, and a more ambitious use: tracking the real-world spending that follows an artist into a venue. That attribution data, he argues, could let a venue plan for a show, measure its value afterwards, and eventually support credit products that advance artists money against future bookings rather than making them wait months for royalties.

In the hot take round, Lilic moves to the subject he is best known for outside Tria: quantum computing. He argues that cryptographically relevant quantum machines could threaten the elliptic curve cryptography that secures the entire industry sooner than most expect, and that the long-term future of money may rest on physics rather than protocols. It leads him to a pointed view on Ethereum's reversal of The DAO hack, which he calls a mistake, and a thesis that quantum-based systems would remove the option of reversing finality altogether.

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