Infrastructure Episodes

Pete Townsend is joined by Martin Watkins, CEO of Montis Group, to discuss what a blockchain-native central securities depository actually does and why it matters for the future of tokenized assets.

Who's watching the agent? That's the question at the heart of this episode — and it's one that's going to define the next decade of finance.

DeFi transparency means every onchain trade is visible. Which means the moment a strategy works, the market can copy it. In this episode of MoneyNeverSleeps, Pete Townsend speaks with Matteo Manzi, co-founder and CEO of Orion Finance, about a structural challenge emerging in onchain asset management: the same transparency that makes blockchain markets verifiable can also expose the intellectual property behind trading strategies. Matteo describes this tension with a simple phrase: “transpa...

Money doesn’t become digital overnight. It becomes digital when the rails of finance begin to change.

Scaling human expertise isn’t a technology problem — it’s a trust problem. In this episode of MoneyNeverSleeps, Pete Townsend speaks with Joni Pirovich, founder of Crystal aOS, about where crypto and AI quietly hit their limits — and why human judgment remains the real constraint as systems scale. Joni explains how her background in legal and regulatory work exposed a simple truth early on: expertise doesn’t scale on its own. As crypto firms mature, the challenge isn’t avoiding regulation,...

Simon Brown joins me to share how his role at Consensys has evolved since his last appearance in January 2024 and why he’s now leading the charge on the Consensys Network State. It’s all about reconnecting the sprawl of the Ethereum ecosystem, reinforcing the cultural gravity that made Ethereum magical in the first place, and creating a more cohesive network of builders, founders, and ecosystem experts.

This week, I sat down with ethical hacker Yev Broshevan, co-founder and Chief Business Development Officer at Hacken, a leading blockchain security firm focused on making Web3 a safer, more trustworthy place for everyone. Even better? Yev’s birthday is the same day this episode drops - happy birthday, Yev!

Niall Mackey, the Commercial Director at Topsec Cloud Solutions, joins the show this week as we take an inside look at how businesses cope in the aftermath of a hack.

Joaquim Matinero Tor joins the show this week as guest co-host as we look at the likely paths to CBDC adoption (Central Bank Digital Currencies) in countries around the world making progress with these digital versions of fiat currencies.

Evan Miyazono is founder and CEO of Atlas Computing, a non-profit formed late last year to help scale human control over risky AI capabilities.

Blockchain ecosystem advisor and researcher Simon Brown from Consensys joins me as guest co-host this week. Consensys is a leading blockchain and web3 software company whose products like MetaMask and Infura are well known to the blockchain and crypto community. Simon and I riffed on Spot Crypto ETFs, the Besu Outage and the creation of the PBS Foundation in the context of the over-centralization of crypto.

I’m joined this week by two of the wonderful people I met at the Solana Breakpoint conference in Amsterdam last month: Amira Valliani, the Head of Policy at the Solana Foundation, and Nick Ducoff, the Head of Institutional Growth at the Solana Foundation.

Eva Lawrence is the Head of EMEA for Figment, the leading provider of blockchain infrastructure, providing staking solutions for institutions.

Neal Peters is co-founder and CEO of JR Studio, a frictionless web3 gaming platform that gives game creators the superpowers to build, host, launch, manage, and grow their games and communities.

Howie Young is the founder and CEO of Protico, a universal chatting interface that enables web3 chat on apps in seconds for enterprises that want to migrate business and engage customers at the web3 level.

Jesse Phillips is the co-founder and CEO of TrustWare, one of the 12 founding teams forming the Techstars Web3 accelerator.  Jesse and Pete Townsend dig into how Jesse got into crypto, the TrustWare vision he formed with co-founder Jonathan Frazier, adjusting to some of the crypto curveballs the world is throwing at TrustWare, and how life experiences are informing the building and scaling of TrustWare.

Eoin and Pete riff on the latest US regulatory crackdown in crypto markets, how NBA Top Shot on the Apple app store is a leading indicator of our wider society’s digital asset adoption whether we realize it or not, trouble in Banking-as-a-Service land with Solaris, Nova Credit’s entry to the UK market, and Revolut’s Irish Trojan Horse.

Eoin and Pete talk through the aftermath of the Ethereum Merge, some pandas and goofy songs, an early-morning Bankless livestream of the Merge, and critically, a 99% more energy-efficient blockchain. We also look at the new Revolut BNPL product live in Ireland, two new funding deals that a16z did on this side of the pond in Sequence and Sardine, opportunities for bored yacht owners, and how it feels like 2002 all over again with builders still building.

Steve Ritter, CTO of Mitek, joins the show this week to share his story on fueling his passion for problem-solving with technology, how he thinks about creating safe digital environments to build trust, achieving the careful balance of friction and convenience in consumer fintech, the reality of defending against deep fakes, digital infrastructure priming the pump of inclusiveness…and rebuilding a 1972 Ford Bronco!

Stefan Uygur joins us from 4Securitas to talk about Acsia.io, a lifetime of cybersecurity, gardening analogies...and flying military helicopters!