The DeFi Decoded Podcast

Join Alex Tapscott as he decodes the world of building in Canada with special guest Daniel Debow, Founder of Debow Musical Instruments and chair of Build Canada. Listen in as Daniel, the serial founder behind Workbrain, Rypple and Helpful and a former Shopify VP, introduces Torch. It's a new electroacoustic "campfire instrument" made of real wood, and it has first-timers playing a song in minutes. He explains how magnets vibrate the wood to make sound, why 90% of beginner guitarists quit within a year, and why he calls Torch a "mission project" rather than a passion project. Alex and Daniel also get into Shopify's hypergrowth years and why applications build platforms, not the other way around. They cover how Build Canada grew from AI-drafted policy memos into polls, candidate surveys and meetups across the country, and why Canada should aim to be number one rather than settle for keeping pace.

Join Alex Tapscott as he decodes the world of AI compute with returning guest Greg Osuri, Founder of Akash Network. Listen in as Greg explains why one lab's soft quarter says little about real demand when only 2.4 million people use agents and supply chains are already maxed out, with four-year waits for transformers and fourteen-year waits for turbines. He explains why AI will become a utility like the internet rather than a subscription like the news, why a $200 plan buying roughly $8,000 of compute means the subsidized party is ending, and how Akash is nearing a trillion tokens a month while doubling monthly. Alex and Greg also get into what's really stalling the build-out — energy, permits, community pushback and the leverage behind the CoreWeave jitters — how the shift from training to inference opens the door to homes, offices and 10-kilowatt clusters, why frontier GPUs now trade only through bilateral contracts and what tradable compute contracts could change, and why Greg believes "homes will be the future of AI."

Join Alex Tapscott as he decodes the world of fintech with special guest Jeff Adamson, co-founder of Neo Financial and Skip the Dishes. Listen in as Jeff traces the path from a five-time national wrestling champion training in the attic of a Saskatoon furniture warehouse to building two of Canada's best-known startups — and why seeing someone from the block over become a champion is what makes ambition feel possible. He explains how Skip nearly died the day it added delivery, why he calls 2008 "the best marketing coup the banks could have ever asked for," and how Neo negotiates wholesale deposit rates on behalf of billions to pass the savings back, Costco-style. Alex and Jeff also get into what breaks when stablecoins, real-time rails, open banking and agentic finance arrive at once — hot money sweeping between institutions overnight, and bidding wars in the split second between tap and approval — why credit bureaus built before women could vote are still gating home ownership, and why being great in Canada isn't enough.

Join Alex Tapscott as he decodes the world of crypto with special guest Luigi D'Onorio DeMeo, Chief Strategy and Business Officer at Aave Labs. Listen in as they trace how a peer-to-peer ETH lending experiment called ETHLend became the largest lending protocol in crypto — $80 billion in deposits and roughly $40 billion in loans at peak, on under a thousand lines of code and no back office. Luigi explains why overcollateralized lending doesn't care who you are, what borrowers actually do with the money, and why flows moved to Aave when Celsius and BlockFi blew up. Plus: why Clarity failing may advantage the risk-tolerant, why bank deposit economics break when the floor on a checking account rises, why every fintech he speaks to is already building on DeFi, and why tokenized equities are the most interesting thing to hit crypto since stablecoins.

Join Alex Tapscott as he decodes the world of crypto with special guest Stefan Rust, CEO of Truflation and former CEO of Bitcoin.com. Listen in as they dig into the number behind the number: why the government still measures inflation by survey using a methodology unchanged in a hundred years, and what changes when you aggregate hundreds of millions of daily data points instead. Stefan explains why $130 trillion is tied to the official print, how Truflation runs ~41 days ahead of the government, and why its number is sometimes lower than CPI, not higher. Plus: what actually drives Fed decisions, why Bitcoin and gold traded like risk assets, and the case that tokenized dollars are what keeps borrowing costs down.

Join Alex Tapscott as he decodes the world of crypto, fintech and AI with special guests Gordon Liao, Chief Economist and Head of Research at Circle, and Ken Ng, Head of Ecosystem at Uniswap Labs. Listen in as Gordon explains why Circle is building Arc — a layer one purpose-built for stablecoin finance, with USDC as gas and the settlement finality institutions need to move trillions in real-world assets — and why another chain doesn't mean another silo. Ken makes the case that Uniswap is the real everything exchange: list once and you're listed everywhere, across a permissionless platform where Fidelity deployed liquidity without telling anyone first. Together they get into what a shared compliance layer would unlock, whether someone in the Philippines will ever hold BUIDL in $100 increments, and why bearer instruments — a centuries-old idea — are the key to tokenized assets. Plus: Circle's $400M all-stock acquisition and stablecoins as global payment rails, what's actually happening at the long end of the bond market, why stablecoins may become the stickiest buyer of short-term government debt, and how AI agents will use crypto — not just to pay each other, but to raise capital.

Join Alex Tapscott as he decodes the world of crypto with special guest Adrian Cachinero Vasiljevic, Co-Founder of Steakhouse Financial. Listen in as they unpack the buzziest topic in DeFi right now: vaults. Adrian explains what a vault actually is (and why the word is as broad as "token"), why most vault capital sits in lending markets, and how onchain vaults can strike a NAV in real time in ways traditional funds and ETFs can't. They dig into Steakhouse's role as one of the largest risk curators in onchain finance — curating close to half the stablecoin deposits on Morpho and serving as the exclusive risk curator of Robinhood Earn — and what a curator can and can't do with your assets. Alex and Adrian also cover the "physics of DeFi," the regulatory road ahead for vaults and the CLARITY Act, who absorbs the losses when things go wrong, and why reimagining finance from first principles is the real frontier.

Join Alex Tapscott as he decodes the world of crypto with special guest Eric Richmond, Country Director and CEO of Coinbase Canada. Listen in as they trade the "everything store" for the "everything exchange" — Coinbase's bet that one trusted, on-chain platform can carry a person's entire financial life. Eric explains why Canada is one of Coinbase's fastest-growing markets now that 25% of Canadians own crypto, what's actually getting used today — USDC yield, crypto derivatives, and tokenized equities that went live this week — and why 24/7 markets and instant settlement make tokenized stocks more than a repackaged brokerage account. Alex and Eric also dig into Canada's regulatory backslide: how a country that led on crypto ETFs ended up governing a new asset class through staff notices and exemption orders, why simply custodying Bitcoin turns it into a security here, and the Schrödinger's stablecoin problem the Stablecoin Act leaves unresolved. Plus: Base as evolution rather than hedge, and why the AI agent economy runs on stablecoins — agents can't open bank accounts, but they can hold wallets.

Join Alex Tapscott as he decodes the world of crypto with special guest Didier Lavallée, Founder and CEO of Tetra Digital Group. Listen in as they discuss why Canada - the birthplace of Ethereum - has ceded its lead in crypto and how a Canadian dollar stablecoin could help win it back. Didier explains the launch of CADD, why domestic payments (not just cross-border remittances) are the surprise growth story, and how orchestration infrastructure lets money move across borders without friction. Alex and Didier also dig into the sovereignty stakes behind Canada's financial system - from the Moneris sale to foreign-controlled crypto apps - why a bank-heavy oligopoly makes disruption so hard, and what it means that former Bank of Canada Deputy Governor Carolyn Wilkins has joined Tetra's advisory council.

Join Alex Tapscott as he decodes the world of crypto with special guests Aryan Sheikhalian, Investor and the Head of Research, and Matt Casto, Head of DeFi, of CMT Digital. Listen in as they discuss how CMT evolved from a proprietary trading firm into one of crypto's earliest institutional investors, why stablecoins and RWAs are becoming platforms rather than just products, and how vaults are emerging as a new institutional primitive. Aryan and Matt also break down what regulators still need to clarify around vaults and the CLARITY Act, why blockchains excel at coordinating capital and resources, and how crypto is uniquely positioned to price novel assets — from compute to perps — as stablecoins continue eating into the legacy payments market.