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In this episode, Austin chats with David and Daniil Liberman of Gonka about the case for using crypto to build a permissionless, meritocratic AI compute network focused on inference rather than decentralized training. They argue that centralized AI infrastructure is rapidly concentrating both revenue and compute, and contrast Bitcoin’s immutable, open rules with corporate systems whose promises can change. With Bitcoin as their north star, Gonka’s protocol aims to verify inference outputs and validate the underlying hardware to guard against fraud, censorship, and model substitution, using proof-of-work-like measurements of real, always-on hardware rather than proof-of-stake incentives. 00:00 - Why Crypto for AI 03:10 - Inference Over Training 05:02 - Bitcoin as Compute Incentives 07:21 - OpenRouter Critiques  11:36 - Open Source and Safety 18:51 - How Gonka Works 20:14 - Verifiable Inference Proof 24:22 - Privacy and Encryption 29:07 - Decentralized Training Roadmap 34:16 - Keeping Frontier Labs Honest 42:44 - More on Why Bitcoin Provides an Ideal Compute Model 44:23 - Where to Learn More Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Austin chats with Declan from Aurora Labs about building on NEAR’s Intents architecture. Declan explains why intents go beyond “a better bridge UI" and how Aurora Intents actually work, enabling one-click cross-chain journeys. They discuss how the protocol helps create liquidity, adoption metrics (over $21B lifetime volume, about $1B monthly), and use cases across wallets, neobanks, payments, RWAs, and more. The conversation also explores inherent cross-chain risks, as highlighted by a Litecoin reorg double-spend incident, and the need for insurance-like protections for onchain products.  0:00 - Aurora Intents Overview  02:57 - Intents vs Bridges  05:21- Solver Network Explained  06:23 - Aurora Intents’ Behind the Scenes Flow  07:43 - Liquidity and Market Making  08:55 - Real World Use Cases  11:25 - Confidential Intents  16:11 - Intents’ Speed Tradeoffs and Risks  17:30 - Litecoin Incident Earlier This Year  19:51 - Liability and Insurance  26:08 - Future Verticals for Intents  28:36 - Where to Learn More Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Austin and Tori join David Hoffman (Bankless) to talk about "anything but crypto." Their conversation spans longevity and mind-uploading, the challenges of changing opinions in public, and how modern media incentives distort nuanced ideas. They also discuss social media, the future of long-form content, AI risk and alignment, what it means to “win” the AI race, regulatory uncertainty, and ... yes, David's ideas around fitness.  00:00 - Welcome and intro  01:46 - How Do You Want to Live?  06:17 - Changing Your Mind as a Public Figure  09:35 - Media Distortion Effects  14:34 - Quality of Content vs Virality  16:33 - Yudkowsky and AI Doom  24:58 - Base Models' Values  27:55 - China and AI's Moral Core  30:01 - What Winning the AI Race Means  36:46 - Why CLARITY Stalled  41:47 - Hypertrophy and Longevity  44:23 - Conclusion Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

And now for something (almost) completely different.  Welcome to Out of Scope, a new sub-series where Austin and Tori Pastore (aka Birb Bernake) riff with guests on hot takes from the frontiers of tech, finance, policy, and whatever else is the flavor of the week In this debut episode, they sit down with Austin Campbell to discuss... quite a few things: running stablecoin reserves, repealing the 17th Amendment, why banks resemble cartels, insider trading, market structure, why regulators should be paid more and held to higher standards, modernizing the BSA, and—most importantly—a definitive ranking of video conferencing tools. 00:00 - Introducing Tori  01:24 - Chinese Peptides Explained  02:45 - GLP 1 Hype Cycle  05:40 - Peptides and Food Science  10:49 - Enter Austin Campbell  16:11- Stablecoin Reserve Rules  20:35 - Gold Doom Scenarios  22:59 - Banks' Payment Monopoly  34:38 - AI Lobbying and EA critiques  38:20 - Prediction Markets Incentives  43:59 - Fixing Regulator Accountability  47:39 - Prediction Markets  48:47 - Market Manipulation Debate  59:54 - Perps Versus Futures  01:02:51 - Assassination Markets Debate  01:06:21 - Austin's Magic Wand Reforms  01:10:40 - Blooper Reel Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Austin chats with Mert about why privacy is becoming essential for crypto and on-chain finance. They discuss how ZK-based privacy works via shielded pools, commitments, proofs, and nullifiers, contrasting it with Monero’s probabilistic obfuscation. Mert explains Zcash’s renewed adoption through improved usability, macro and regulatory shifts, and fairer historical distribution. He argues privacy layers fail when they lack tangible benefits, and outlines a new fully on-chain, composable, atomic privacy protocol for Solana built with Light Protocol’s compression approach, including permissionless and enterprise “zones” with configurable compliance features and reduced MEV via encrypted swaps.  00:00 - Why Privacy Matters  03:05 - Zcash And ZK Origins  06:26 - How Shielded Pools Work  09:56 - Why Zcash Broke Out  15:52 - Why Privacy Layers Fail  19:47 - Solana Privacy Protocol  22:57 - Composability Breakthrough  25:51 - Go-To-Market Plan  30:50 - Compliance And Zones  32:40 - Onchain Versus Off Chain  34:58 - Zcash And Solana’s Future  40:29 - Bitcoin Privacy And Quantum  43:48 - Closing And Where To Find Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Austin chats with Seth (Cake Wallet) about why privacy is gaining traction after years of being niche, tracing Seth’s entry through Monero and other privacy-preserving products. They compare Zcash’s seemingly influencer-driven pump with Monero’s quieter but rising real-world usage, discuss Cake Wallet’s UX-driven approach (including enforced auto-shielding for Zcash), and debate how criminal adoption can actually validate that privacy tools work in adversarial settings while emphasizing legitimate use cases and storytelling. They explore why app-layer privacy on major L1s has weak adoption versus privacy-native L1s, the importance of defaults, and what’s next for privacy in DeFi and stablecoins. 00:00 - Seth’s Personal and Professional Privacy Journey  05:53 - Zcash vs Monero Adoption  09:51 - Crime Compliance and Privacy Ethics  15:25 - Why Privacy-Preserving Wallet UX Has Lagged  20:49 - Privacy L1s vs. App-Layer Privacy  27:30 - What’s Next Private DeFi  30:07 - Why Monero Has Survived CEX Delistings  32:35 - Privacy in the Age of AI Surveillance  41:51 - Conclusion    Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Austin chats with Emmett Hollyer about the evolution and future of Solana Mobile. They reflect on how the successes and missteps of the Saga phone informed the more refined Seeker, with a focus on improvements in design, pricing, and usability. Emmett discusses scaling production to meet over 100,000 preorders, strategies for attracting developers, and the rationale behind launching a token to align incentives across the ecosystem. The conversation also explores plans to expand beyond in-house devices through partnerships with Android manufacturers, positioning Solana Mobile as a broader crypto platform rather than just a hardware company. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Austin chats with Rahul Jain (Head of Trading at Ellipsis Labs) to explore the evolution of market making in crypto. Rahul discusses what gives crypto market makers an edge, why being early matters, and how crypto has created new challenges around MEV, transaction landing, and execution. They explore the future prospects of prop AMMs, perps, MCP, and what it will take for on-chain finance to scale beyond crypto-native users and compete with traditional markets.    Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Austin sits down with Brennan to unpack Constellation, Solana’s latest market structure proposal, and what it could mean for the network’s future. The conversation centers on Brennan’s perspective on why Solana’s current leader-based design creates challenges around transaction ordering, predictability, and censorship resistance, and how Constellation aims to address those issues through a new multi-proposer framework. They explore the trade-offs between latency, complexity, and fairness, debate whether the proposal strikes the right balance for traders and validators, and discuss how it fits into Solana’s broader roadmap. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this first part in a series of debates on Constellation (Anza's MCP proposal), Austin chats with Ben from Temporal. The conversation focuses on Ben’s measured critical perspective, highlighting his concerns around the proposal’s trade-offs, including added complexity, potential unintended effects on market structure, and whether alternative approaches could achieve similar gains in censorship resistance and throughput. They dig into the proposal’s underlying motivation, debate whether current limitations in Solana’s architecture are being correctly diagnosed, and explore what these design decisions could mean for the next generation of on-chain trading and market infrastructure. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, we sit down with the team behind MegaETH to discuss the launch of their mainnet and the vision for a new generation of high-performance Layer 2 blockchains. We explore how MegaETH is pushing block times into the millisecond range, what that means for onchain markets, and why ultra-low latency could fundamentally change blockspace auctions and transaction ordering. The conversation also covers token utility, sequencer incentives, fraud proof security, and why the long-term endgame for rollups is real-time ZK proving. We also dive into the practical challenges of building high-performance crypto infrastructure — from co-location and distributed RPC networks to designing an ecosystem that can actually take advantage of that speed.    To learn more about MegaETH, check out:  https://www.megaeth.com/  https://rabbithole.megaeth.com/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Austin chats with Pranav Raval (Aptos Labs) about Shelby, a new decentralized storage protocol designed to address the performance and cost limitations of earlier decentralized storage systems. The conversation dives into Shelby’s architecture and market opportunities. Unlike previous systems that rely on unreliable “spare capacity” nodes, Shelby uses professionally operated data centers, erasure coding for reliability, and incentives for fast data retrieval. This design enables new use cases beyond simple file storage, including verifiable advertising analytics, IP-protected generative media, AI data marketplaces, and distributed AI inference at the network edge. Pranav explains how Shelby can position itself as infrastructure for data-intensive applications—especially those driven by AI—while offering an alternative to the expensive egress fees and regional data silos of traditional cloud providers. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Austin talks with Anthony, Executive Director of Wyoming’s Stable Token Commission, about how Wyoming became the first U.S. state to issue its own government-backed stablecoin. They discuss the state’s decade-long push into crypto policy, why Wyoming chose to operate digital financial infrastructure instead of just regulating it, and how the Frontier Stable Token is designed to be fully backed, legally neutral, and usable for any lawful purpose. The conversation covers constitutional safeguards around privacy and due process, how reserves generate public revenue, and why a small, agile state may be uniquely positioned to experiment with on-chain money—offering a glimpse into what the future of state finance could look like.   Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Austin chats with Santiago Roel Santos, founder of Inversion, discussing why crypto has struggled to reach mainstream adoption and what it will take to change that. Santiago explains how Inversion applies a private-equity-style model to deploy capital into real-world use cases, rather than chasing speculative cycles. He outlines why stablecoins are emerging as crypto’s strongest product-market fit, what infrastructure still needs to mature, and how regulatory clarity is shaping global distribution. The conversation also covers chain selection, the limits of “casino onboarding,” and why genuine adoption depends on building products that solve practical problems for people and businesses.  00:00 - Understanding Inversion and Its Origins  07:18 - Crypto's Consumer to Enterprise Shift  12:59 - Interoperability and Choosing the Right Blockchain  17:16 - Private Equity in a High Interest Rate Environment  20:16 - Distribution vs. Product in Crypto  25:50 - The Future of Crypto and Stablecoins 33:19 - Global Economic Power and Technology  35:51 - Crypto's Impact on Corporate Structures  40:32 - Tokenized Stocks and Market Access  48:02 - Advice for Founders in the Crypto Space Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Austin chats with Sid Powell, co-founder and CEO of Maple Finance, to explore how institutional credit is moving on-chain. Sid breaks down how Maple has facilitated over $5 billion in loans, how it manages risk and transparency in a post–Celsius world, and what’s next for tokenized private credit. We also discuss stablecoins, regulation, and how crypto finance is maturing for the long term. 00:00 - Understanding Maple Finance  02:03 - Comparing Maple to Celsius  09:39 - Institutional Clientele  16:42 - Maple's Navigation of Different Blockchain Ecosystems  22:58 - The Case for Vertical Integration  23:57 - Challenges in Financial Services 25:12 - Crypto's Overall Growth  26:49 - The Future of Banking and Crypto Adoption  30:57 - Stablecoins and Cross-Border Payments  38:21 - Automation and Efficiency in Crypto Lending  44:00 - Conclusion Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.