Advertise on podcast: TRM Talks

Last week TRM announced Ardence, an AI investigation platform that combines on-chain blockchain data with more than 50 off-chain partner sources into a single picture of risk. In this episode of TRM Talks, Ari Redbord, TRM Labs' Global Head of Policy, sits down with two of the people who built Ardence, Simon Warren and Lexie Nappi, to talk about what it takes to build an AI investigations platform that investigators can trust. Simon leads go-to-market strategy for Ardence across EMEA and APAC after a career that took him from the British and Australian armies through cyber threat intelligence. Lexie leads the platform's AI evaluations team after tracing crypto for US Cyber Command. They walk through what it took to build Ardence, starting with a three-pronged data partnership strategy that TRM shaped around the sources its clients asked for. Analysts can begin an investigation from a single seed such as an email address, a wallet, or a name, or from a plain-language prompt, then work in either direction from there. Investigators can also dial the level of human oversight up or down on each case, depending on how much judgment they want to hand to the AI.

Sanjeev Bhasker was a federal prosecutor, Digital Currency Counsel at DOJ, cyber counsel in the Biden White House, and acting general counsel in the second Trump administration. He is now at K&L Gates. He joins Ari for his second TRM Talks. Sanjeev tried nearly a hundred cases as a prosecutor and used BSA reporting to trace dark-web crypto cases back through exchanges. At the White House he worked on the GENIUS Act, the AI Action Plan, the one-dollar LLM contracts with GSA, and the post-quantum cryptography executive order. On quantum he is direct: nation states are already stealing encrypted data to crack later, NIST has published PQC standards, and boards should not wait for Q Day around 2029 to act. This conversation is not just about crypto, or quantum, or AI. It is about how the three intersect, and why we are now in an age where these technologies have to be viewed together, from a national security perspective and as a matter of policy. That is how Sanjeev approached them in government, and it runs through everything here, from the Bitcoin reserve to AI washing to Genesis Mission grant money.

Amy Oldenburg spent 26 years at Morgan Stanley — operations, emerging-market FX, the trading desk, then the firm's global emerging-market investing business — before the bank created a Head of Digital Assets seat and asked her to do it full time. In this TRM Talks, Amy joins Ari to talk about how she leveraged over two decades at the Morgan Stanley to accelerate the firm’s exploration into digital assets. The conversation moves from bicycle-messenger settlements in India and currency devaluations to why so many of Amy’s former emerging-market FX colleagues ended up in crypto. Amy talks through what she is seeing across banking, equities, wealth, and asset management: what is possible today, what still depends on regulation, and what could change by 2028 and beyond. She also breaks down tokenization as financial plumbing — simpler systems, faster yields, and more efficient capital calls — and shares a lesson from having an expensive NFT phished from her wallet: transparency does not always mean safety.

In this episode, Ari is joined by close friends and two of the most important voices in our space: Rebecca Rettig, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Legal Officer at Jito Labs, and Michael Mosier, founding partner of Arktouros and former acting director of FinCEN. Rebecca developed deep subject matter expertise as a financial-services litigator working with the earliest DeFi protocols, including an early pitch to Uniswap when the team numbered four people in a Williamsburg loft. Michael came through DOJ, OFAC, and FinCEN, and traces a through-line from protective orders for domestic-violence survivors to cryptography as a tool for people living under authoritarian control. The focus is on the future of DeFi. In a brand new paper, the dynamic duo lay out a framework institutions can implement under current law, and explains why OFAC and BSA enforcement has never targeted SWIFT, telecoms, or RPC nodes the way critics fear it will target crypto infrastructure. They cover the GENIUS Act's focus on issuers rather than networks, US DOJ’s prosecution of a Tornado Cash developer and the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act. Mosier also addresses the panic around AI, arguing these systems function as motion sensors rather than a person standing in front of the car with a red flag.

Australia just rolled out its biggest anti-money laundering reform in two decades — and it didn't just tighten existing rules, it more than doubled the number of businesses AUSTRAC regulates almost overnight, from roughly 19,000 to over 50,000, sweeping in lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, and dealers in precious metals and stones for the first time. Brad Brown, AUSTRAC's National Manager for Regulatory Operations, joins Ari to walk through what changed, why AUSTRAC redefined digital currency exchanges as "virtual asset service providers" to align with FATF standards, and what that reclassification means in practice for crypto businesses now covering custody, wallets, and transfers, not just cash-to-crypto conversions. Brad has spent more than two decades at AUSTRAC across intelligence, policy, international engagement, and now supervision, following a career in Australian law enforcement. The conversation digs into AUSTRAC's focus on outcomes-focused, risk-based supervision, the scale of the fraud threat Australia is confronting — part of an estimated USD 500 billion in global fraud losses in 2024 and 2025 — and how the Beacon Network, the largest public-private information-sharing and seizure network in the crypto ecosystem, is helping regulators and exchanges move faster against bad actors.

In 1934, legal scholar Adolf Berle wrote a footnote speculating that someone might one day hold a passive property right in active property — what we'd now call a governance token. He called it a problem for another day. For Teresa Goody Guillén, founding partner of Bellamentis and founder of the legal AI platform Sophie Lex, that day is now, and it's reshaping how she advises clients building in digital markets. Teresa joins Ari to trace a career that runs from a plaintiff's law firm and a federal clerkship for Judge Urbina of the US District Court for the District of Columbia, through the SEC's Office of General Counsel and a stint working alongside former SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt, to launching her own law firm built around the convergence of traditional and digital financial markets. Her name has even come up as a potential contender for SEC Chair. The conversation moves from the day-to-day of her practice — clients navigating exemptive relief, subpoenas, and the "security or commodity" question she thinks misses the point — to what she's building next. Through Sophie Lex, she's developing proprietary AI trained on her own legal reasoning to help lawyers work faster without losing judgment, arguing AI should scale lawyers rather than replace them. She also shares her take on SEC Chair Paul Atkins' modernization push and why she thinks exemptive relief, more than new legislation, could unlock effective crypto regulation today.

Juan Zarate joined the US Treasury just three weeks before September 11, 2001, and helped build the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI), transforming Treasury into a cornerstone of American national security. He later chronicled that evolution in Treasury’s War, the definitive account of how financial intelligence, sanctions, and economic power became central tools of US statecraft. In this episode, Juan joins Ari to discuss how the post-9/11 financial architecture still underpins U.S. national security—and how it must evolve for an era of cryptocurrency, AI, and emerging technologies.

Criminals have no compliance officers and no regulators looking over their shoulder. That means their barrier to adopting new technology — including AI — is effectively zero. They don't need a tool to work for five years. They need it to work for the next five hours. Vatsa Narasimha, CEO of ComplyAdvantage, has been watching this asymmetry define the fraud landscape for years, and his answer is a platform built to match it. Vatsa joins Ari to talk through what building ComplyAdvantage have taught him about fighting financial crime as a network problem rather than a point-in-time compliance exercise. The conversation covers the industrialization of fraud (synthetic IDs, money mule recruitment at scale, AI-enabled targeting of retirees and immigrant workers), the architecture behind ComplyAdvantage's new Mesh platform, and the case for information sharing as a structural defense against crime networks whose strength lies in their interconnection. TRM focuses on the on-chain world; ComplyAdvantage focuses on the off-chain. Together, Vatsa argues, they cover the full picture.

On this TRM Talks, Ari sits down with the team behind Unchained DEX in the City — three of the sharpest legal minds in crypto and three of his closest friends — for a wide-ranging conversation about the regulatory questions reshaping the industry in real time. TuongVy Le, Jessi Brooks, and Katherine Kirkpatrick Bos bring their distinct backgrounds as prosecutors, general counsels, and enforcement attorneys to bear on what investor protection, custody, and market integrity actually look like in a market structure with no historical precedent. The SEC has provided guidance and clarity, the CFTC is emerging as a consequential voice on digital assets, perps and prediction markets , and the work ahead is proving that a new market structure can deliver on those fundamentals. The conversation covers the legal architecture being built right now, the national security stakes of DeFi exploits, the case for privacy as a precondition for institutional capital, and the founding mission of the show: amplifying the women writing crypto's rulebook. No Mr. Big’s on this one, just the Carrie Bradshaws of crypto providing cutting edge legal insights. Origin stories, journeys, and genuine friendship make this one of the most fun episodes of the year.

If a sufficiently powerful quantum computer came online tomorrow, every token on every blockchain would be a target — Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana all share signature schemes that pre-date the post-quantum era. The math has been clear since the 1990s. What's been missing is the machine. That uncomfortable truth anchors this week's TRM Talks. Brett Falk, research faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Crypto and Society Lab, joins Ari to work through what that actually means — why Shor's algorithm threatens every chain, what NIST's 2024 post-quantum standards mean in practice, and why Ethereum is better positioned than Bitcoin to respond. They also dig into the back-to-back Drift and Kelp DAO exploits and what made the DPRK playbook behind them unlike anything we've seen before, and into the cryptographic tools — zero-knowledge proofs, secure multi-party computation, credential-based KYC — that let users prove compliance without turning every business into a ransomware target. The math to thread that needle already exists.

Brynly Llyr has deep roots in fintech and blockchain — in-house at eBay, PayPal, and Ripple, where she served as one of the first general counsels in crypto, then founding team at Celo, then Head of Blockchain and Digital Assets at the World Economic Forum. Now she’s Deputy Commissioner for Digital Financial Assets at the California DFPI, leading the rollout of the Digital Financial Assets Law, which goes live July 1, 2026, covering exchanges, custodians, stablecoin issuers, and crypto kiosks across the world’s fourth-largest economy. Ari Redbord, TRM’s Global Head of Policy, sits down with Brynly to talk through what California is actually trying to solve. IC3 data puts the state at the top of the country for crypto-related fraud losses, with serious harm to elderly residents and teenagers under 17. Her thesis: licensed intermediaries that recognize fraud patterns are the most powerful lever a regulator has. They also dig into how blockchain’s public visibility changes what supervisors can see in real time — and what that means for every licensed business managing its own risk. The conversation covers AI’s role in regulation, what success looks like a year from now, and the universal experience of feeding teenage boys.

Behind every laundered transaction is a real victim, a real crime, and a real reason to do this work well. That conviction has shaped Sophie Bowler's entire career — from her first job working on the EU's Fourth Anti-Money Laundering Directive as an intern in Brussels, to her current role as Global Chief Risk and Compliance Officer at Zodia Custody. In this conversation with Ari Redbord, Global Head of Policy at TRM Labs, Sophie traces her path from the European Parliament to leading risk and compliance across six jurisdictions. She unpacks what it really took to secure Zodia's MiCA license in Luxembourg in December 2024 and explains how the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) has forced firms to rethink vendor risk, criticality assessments, and continuity from the ground up. Sophie shares why Zodia joined TRM's Beacon Network, how real-time information sharing across the industry has changed the speed at which illicit funds can be identified and interdicted, and why this kind of coordinated response is uniquely possible in crypto.

Catherine Gu has always been at the center of the shift toward the decentralization of money, a transformation that was once theoretical but is now actively reshaping global financial markets through stablecoins and on-chain infrastructure. Inspired in part by Hayek’s vision of competing private forms of money, Catherine’s work sits at the intersection of that idea and its real-world implementation. As Head of Product for Digital Assets at the Solana Foundation, she is helping build what is increasingly viewed as the internet capital market, where speed, scale, and global access redefine how value moves. Before joining Solana, she was one of the earliest members of Visa’s crypto team, where she spent years bridging traditional finance and blockchain and leading the development of tokenized asset infrastructure designed for financial institutions. In this conversation, Ari and Catherine trace that journey and explore what it means for the future of financial markets. We discuss why Solana has emerged as a critical platform for stablecoin activity, what it means to embed compliance and trust into infrastructure from the outset, and how performance, liquidity, and developer resilience are shaping the next phase of institutional adoption. This is no longer a debate about whether money will evolve. It is a conversation about how that evolution is being built in real time.

When the Bitcoin white paper landed in 2008, most people saw a payment system. Shaul Kfir saw a privacy problem — because he had spent years working on the zero-knowledge proof technology that would eventually make private transactions possible on blockchains. That instinct shaped everything that followed, including the Canton Network, the blockchain he co-founded that now moves trillions of dollars a month for some of the world's largest financial institutions. Shaul's path is unlike most in this space. He co-authored libsnark, the seminal zkSNARK library that helped bring zero-knowledge proofs to blockchains, studied under Turing Award winner Ron Rivest at MIT, and built one of Israel's first Bitcoin brokerages before turning his attention to the infrastructure problem that would define his career: how do you build a blockchain that institutions can actually use? In this episode, Ari sits down with Shaul to explore why privacy was a non-negotiable design principle from day one, why the industry is now at a genuine inflection point as institutions move from private to public blockchain environments, and what the beginning of institutional DeFi actually looks like in practice. They also dig into the tension between privacy and compliance and why regulators should focus on desired system properties rather than prescribing specific technologies. When he is not building financial infrastructure, Shaul is on the water — a former Israeli Navy Lieutenant Commander who still races sailboats, once captured a whale breach on his Ray-Ban Meta glasses mid-race, and finds the parallel between navigating a storm at sea and building in crypto surprisingly easy to draw.

Crypto investigations are becoming a core part of modern policing. From ransomware and darknet markets to fraud and organized crime, digital assets increasingly appear in criminal investigations. Det. Anoop “Snoop” Dattani of the Regional Organized Crime Unit at West Midlands Police joins Ari to discuss how investigators are adapting. Drawing on nearly two decades in policing and extensive cyber investigative experience, Snoop explains how crypto cases often move in two directions: reactive investigations that begin with a wallet address or victim report, and proactive investigations that start with a small intelligence lead and grow into broader criminal networks. The conversation explores why blockchain evidence can be so powerful, how crypto fits into wider criminal typologies, and why training across frontline policing is increasingly important. Snoop also highlights the importance of protecting the legitimate crypto ecosystem — and shares a bit about his own interest in the growing gaming ecosystem on Solana. A practical conversation about how law enforcement is adapting to technology — and where crypto investigations are headed next.