In this episode, Austin chats with Santiago Roel Santos, founder of Inversion, discussing why crypto has struggled to reach mainstream adoption and what it will take to change that. Santiago explains how Inversion applies a private-equity-style model to deploy capital into real-world use cases, rather than chasing speculative cycles. He outlines why stablecoins are emerging as crypto’s strongest product-market fit, what infrastructure still needs to mature, and how regulatory clarity is shaping global distribution. The conversation also covers chain selection, the limits of “casino onboarding,” and why genuine adoption depends on building products that solve practical problems for people and businesses.

00:00 - Understanding Inversion and Its Origins

07:18 - Crypto's Consumer to Enterprise Shift

12:59 - Interoperability and Choosing the Right Blockchain

17:16 - Private Equity in a High Interest Rate Environment

20:16 - Distribution vs. Product in Crypto

25:50 - The Future of Crypto and Stablecoins

33:19 - Global Economic Power and Technology

35:51 - Crypto's Impact on Corporate Structures

40:32 - Tokenized Stocks and Market Access

48:02 - Advice for Founders in the Crypto Space

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In this episode, Austin chats with Sid Powell, co-founder and CEO of Maple Finance, to explore how institutional credit is moving on-chain. Sid breaks down how Maple has facilitated over $5 billion in loans, how it manages risk and transparency in a post–Celsius world, and what’s next for tokenized private credit. We also discuss stablecoins, regulation, and how crypto finance is maturing for the long term.

00:00 - Understanding Maple Finance

02:03 - Comparing Maple to Celsius

09:39 - Institutional Clientele

16:42 - Maple's Navigation of Different Blockchain Ecosystems

22:58 - The Case for Vertical Integration

23:57 - Challenges in Financial Services

25:12 - Crypto's Overall Growth

26:49 - The Future of Banking and Crypto Adoption

30:57 - Stablecoins and Cross-Border Payments

38:21 - Automation and Efficiency in Crypto Lending

44:00 - Conclusion

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In this episode, Kevin Bowers returns to explain Jump's expansion from trading to core infrastructure, centered on what he calls the "great inversion": the real bottleneck in tech isn't compute, but data and I/O. He introduces Shelby, a new storage network, as a direct challenge to the "Hotel California for Data" model used by cloud providers. This same focus on efficient data flow—not just processing power—was the key to scaling Solana with Fire Dancer. Finally, Kevin explains how FPGAs from high-frequency trading are the critical hardware solution, allowing blockchains to bypass software's inefficient "Tower of Babel" and "get close to the wire" for true high performance.

00:00 - Expanding Beyond Trading and the Vision for Shelby

02:31 - Challenges in Storage and Data Management

04:37 - Building High-Performance Systems

08:04 - The Evolution of Jump's Technology

11:55 - The Economics of Cloud Storage

29:07 - Fire Dancer and Frankendancer

42:03 - The Cost of Optimization

42:48 - Machine Learning and Custom Networks

43:47 - Project Prioritization and Entropy

46:48 - Challenges in High-Performance Computing

56:38 - The Role of FPGAs in Trading and Blockchain

01:13:45 - Future of Hardware Acceleration in Blockchain

01:18:54 -Conclusion and Final Thoughts

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