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Kristin Smith is President of the Solana Policy Institute. She joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss why the Clarity Act stalled in the US Senate. Kristin explains how the politics around President Trump, opposition from the banking lobby and a shifting Democratic electorate derailed the bill, and why she believes the industry still came out ahead as the SEC…
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Episode 200Kristin Smith is President of the Solana Policy Institute. She joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss why the Clarity Act stalled in the US Senate. Kristin explains how the politics around President Trump, opposition from the banking lobby and a shifting Democratic electorate derailed the bill, and why she believes the industry still came out ahead as the SEC…
Episode 199Marcos Allende is CEO and co-founder of Blerify. He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss why AI is making passwords, selfie checks and passport scans obsolete as a way to prove identity online. Marcos explains how Blerify's identity wallets and blockchain-based trust registry allow digital IDs to be verified across borders, and why companies and governments…
Episode 198Didier Lavallée is the CEO of Tetra Digital Group, the Canadian trust company behind CAD Digital (CADD), a Canadian dollar stablecoin that launched in May. He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss why Canada went so long without a usable domestic stablecoin, and how Tetra grew out of the QuadrigaCX collapse into the country's first qualified digital asset…
Episode 197Alvin Kan is the COO of Bitget Wallet. He joins host Aaron Stanley at Blockchain Rio to discuss the shift from crypto wallet to everyday finance app, where users save, spend and invest dollars in one place. In August, daily payment transactions on the wallet overtook daily trading transactions for the first time in its eight-year history. Kan explains why…
Episode 196Gean Chu is a partner at Honey Island Capital. He joins host Aaron Stanley for a deep dive on quantum computing, which has become one of the main factors weighing on crypto markets in 2026. Gean breaks down the March paper from Google Quantum AI that cut the estimated hardware requirement for breaking Bitcoin twentyfold, explains why roughly 6.9 million…
Episode 195Raagulan Pathy is the CEO of Kast. He joins host Aaron Stanley at Blockchain Rio 2026, a year after his first appearance and roughly $80 million in Series A funding later. Rags explains why he thinks the stablecoin neobank market is winner take most, why Kast scrapped its planned token airdrop in favor of equity, and what the company found when 20 to 30% of…
Episode 194Ilya Brovin is Chief Growth Officer of Sumsub. He joins host Aaron Stanley at Bitso Business' Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City to discuss how AI is changing identity fraud. Sumsub onboards 12 to 15 million people a month, and Brovin describes a clear shift over the past year: criminals have stopped faking documents by hand and started training agents to…
Episode 193Yatharth Sejpal and Brian Li are co-founder/CEO and co-founder/CTO of Knowidea. They join host Aaron Stanley at the Ai4 Conference in Las Vegas to discuss why they're betting on formally verified, deterministic AI instead of the 95 percent confidence models most companies accept. The two explain their neurosymbolic architecture, which forces AI agents to…
Episode 192Luca Prosperi is CEO and co-founder of M0. He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss the state of stablecoin infrastructure in 2026, two years after his first appearance on the show. They cover the wallet-centric shift in finance, the fight over stablecoin yield, and why Prosperi thinks local-currency stablecoins, not on-chain FX, will be the next big trend.…
Episode 191Joao Reginatto of M0, Monica Ramirez of Anchorage Digital, Olivia Vande Woude of Ava Labs, and Sheraz Shere of Solana Foundation join host Aaron Stanley at the Bitso Business Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City to discuss stablecoin readiness and the gap between corporate intent and implementation. The tech and the regulatory picture have mostly caught up,…
Episode 190Olivia Vande Woude is Tokenization Lead at Ava Labs. She joins host Aaron Stanley at Bitso's Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City to discuss why distribution, not issuance, is the hardest problem left to solve in tokenized real world assets. We talk through Open Trade's B2B2C stablecoin yield model gaining traction across LATAM and APAC, a coming wave of…
Episode 189Guillermo Goncalvez is CEO of El Dorado. He joins host Aaron Stanley at Bitso's Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City to discuss El Dorado's new $9 million Series A round, led by Paradigm with Coinbase Ventures participating. Goncalvez explains how El Dorado is taking the liquidity network it built serving over a million consumers across Latin America and…
The premise
Bits & Borders treats financial innovation as more than a product story. The show follows the institutions, incentives, regulations and cross-border realities that determine what becomes durable.
The format
Substantive interviews with the operators, policymakers and builders shaping new financial and technological systems.
Event-native conversations captured where the industry is gathering and the live questions are taking shape.
Written context that connects the episode-level conversation to larger market and institutional shifts.
Current editorial focus
As software begins to transact, questions of identity, authority, settlement and accountability move from the edge of the financial system toward its center.
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