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. Alejand...

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.

Pete is joined by Eric Ries, author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, for a conversation about the invisible structural forces that corrupt even the most mission-driven companies, and what founders can do about it before it's too late.

Pete Townsend is joined by Sal Ternullo, CEO of SVRN and Managing Partner at A100x Ventures, for a conversation about how to tell the difference between a token that represents ownership of the value-creating thing and one that's an accelerant bolted onto something else.

In the last few weeks, Drift Protocol and Kelp DAO lost $577 million between them. Neither one was a code exploit. Both were operational and governance failures. That's the conversation Pete sits down with Amor Sexton to have on EP 314 of MoneyNeverSleeps — and it's the conversation the industry isn't having loudly enough. Amor is Chief Operating Officer at Blockdaemon, one of the world's leading institutional-grade blockchain infrastructure providers. She was last on the show in October 2022 (E...

Dan Gold is founder and CEO of Stratiphy, and as far as anyone knows, the only platform offering tax-efficient crypto exposure to UK retail investors right now.

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.

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.

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: “transparen...

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 domes...

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, bu...

Surviving the hard days of startup life isn’t about working more - it’s about building the right support around you.

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.