Stablecoins Episodes

The Drive to Five: Unpacking Citi's $5.5T Tokenization Forecast In June 2026, Citi Institute released "Tokenization 2030: Wall Street On-Chain" — a report that puts a hard number on a question the industry has been circling for years. Their base case: $5.5 trillion in tokenized financial assets by 2030, with a bear case of $2.7 trillion and a bull case of $8.2 trillion. For a market sitting at roughly $17 billion today, that's not an incremental forecast. It's a bet on structural change. A...

Talent is equally distributed. Opportunity is not. John Hill, VP of Story at Whop, has spent his career watching founders in Cape Town, Lagos, and Medellín build something real — and then hit a wall the moment they try to get paid.

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

Money doesn’t become geopolitical overnight.It becomes geopolitical when the rails start to change. In this episode of MoneyNeverSleeps, Pete Townsend is joined by Sean Lee for a deep, practical conversation on what China is actually building with the digital yuan — and why this shift is about infrastructure, not currency replacement. Sean brings first-hand insight from recent meetings with the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), explaining how China’s digital yuan efforts are moving beyond a d...

Crypto doesn’t win in 2026 by being louder - it wins by becoming boring.

Stablecoins aren’t just a crypto story anymore — they’re a geopolitical one.

Alejandro Gutierrez joins me to talk Solana in Ireland, stablecoins, and tokenized securities - plus I share the launch of Norio Ventures Fund I and what’s ahead for Episode 300.

This week, I caught up with Jesse Phillips, co-founder and CEO of Trustware, and one of the most quietly determined founders I’ve ever backed. I invested in Jesse and his co-founder Jonathan Frazier through the Techstars Web3 accelerator in 2023, and since then, Trustware⁠ have done what most early-stage startups only dream of—shipping a real product, signing real customers, and generating real revenue… all on just $400K in capital and a team of six. In this conversation, Jesse and I get i...

This week, I sat down with my longtime Techstars colleague and friend Allard Luchsinger, Managing Director of the ABN AMRO + Techstars Future of Finance Accelerator in Amsterdam.

This week, I’m joined once again by Alejandro Gutierrez, now officially leading Solana Superteam Ireland, a new initiative powered by the Solana Foundation to accelerate Web3 innovation across the entire island of Ireland.

This week, I’m joined by the ever-insightful and gloriously unfiltered Laura Walsh for a whirlwind spin through the crypto-political multiverse. From BlackRock’s Larry Fink flirting with Bitcoin as the next global reserve currency to Trump-World and Cowboy State stablecoins, this episode has more layers than a Siberian haplogroup.

In this special year-end episode, Pete Townsend is joined by returning guest co-host Alejandro Gutierrez for a wide-ranging conversation about what the future may hold with their 2025 predictions. Together, they explore transformative ideas, emerging trends, and groundbreaking technologies that could shape industries, disrupt norms, and redefine global innovation. From traditional finance’s embrace of tokenization to the rise of AI agents, the duo covers it all—including bonus predictions from Funds industry and fintech legend Eoin Motherway. Tune in for an exciting glimpse into 2025 and get ready to peer into the crystal ball with Pete and Alejandro.

Niall Dennehy is an Irish entrepreneur and the co-founder and COO of AID:Tech, who are bringing traceability and transparency to the flow of funds for governments, NGOs and charities with their payments and digital identity infrastructure bridging web2 to web3.

Linda Jeng is the Founder and CEO of Digital Self Labs, and she joins me in exploring the evolving landscape of stablecoins. Our discussion focuses on our key takeaways from Castle Island Ventures' latest stablecoin report, 'Stablecoins: the Emerging Market Story'. Linda shares her background in financial regulation, blockchain, and AI, and offers critical insights into how stablecoins are reshaping financial systems in emerging markets. Through a detailed analysis of the Castle Island Ventur...

Returning from our summer hiatus, Laura Walsh joins the show again this week as guest co-host as we dive into Crypto Politics by unpacking Donald Trump's campaign promises involving bitcoin and crypto.

Gray Webb is co-founder and CTO at Liquibit Capital, and we kick things off with a look at what’s happened with BTC since the latest bitcoin halving.  Gray and I then riff on the evolution of bitcoin into a long-term holding with huge opportunities for financial innovation.  We also look at the mainstreaming of stablecoins as the killer app for crypto and how stablecoins have only scratched the surface by nudging past Visa in quarterly settlement volume.

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.

Igor Khmel is the co-founder and CEO of SaveChain, the borderless banking app. SaveChain features a self-custody 'stablecoin-only' wallet with a banking interface for the global underbanked, with the option to open an FDIC-insured bank account for non-US residents. In short, SaveChain is Metamask meets Revolut.

This week, Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend riff on Eoin’s new role at Enterprise Ireland, the final nail in the coffin for Meta’s former crypto project Diem, the next steps for Ant Group now that Jack Ma is formally out, the back and forth on the environmental impact of crypto and bitcoin’s role, some new ideas on agri-finance thanks to past guest Nik Milanovich, and some details on an event Pete’s co-hosting for Techstars Web3 with Genesis Block and Union Square Ventures in New York City on 17-Jan-23.

Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend riff on what started out as a student lending platform in SoFi now becoming a full-service digital finance player, Circle’s new SPAC deal in the context of stablecoins, advertising and naming rights in crypto and a long-term view on what Apple could be up to with Stripe.

Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend walk through Amazon’s new partnership with BNPL (buy-now-pay-later) player Affirm and what this means for the Amazon flywheel, and then answer the question ‘what’s a stablecoin?’ in the context of USD Coin and the Centre Consortium, before diving into the world of NFTs through Visa’s $150,000 purchase of a CryptoPunk NFT and the big opportunity for monetizing the metaverse.