Podcast

The Defiant Podcast delivers insightful discussions on decentralized finance, featuring interviews with DeFi's top innovators and analysis of the latest trends shaping the financial blockchain landscape.

Top Stories

MoneyGram CEO on rolling out MGUSD to its 60 million users, globally

MoneyGram has been quietly building on blockchain for over five years. Now, with its own stablecoin (MGUSD), a Kraken partnership, a validator seat on the Tempo network, and $2B+ in stablecoin settlements already running — the pace is accelerating.

🟢 LIVE - The Fable Backlash: Is This the Case for Decentralized AI?

Last week Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5 — and within 48 hours it became one of the messiest releases in frontier AI. A buried line in the model's system card revealed Fable would silently degrade its own answers for anyone it suspected of building competing AI systems, with no warning. Researchers called it silent sabotage. Anthropic apologized and reversed course. Add a 30-day data-retention requirement that got the model banned inside Microsoft, and you have a live referendum on the question crypto has been asking for years: should any single company hold this much control over frontier AI?

🟢 LIVE - The Fable Backlash: Is This the Case for Decentralized AI?

Bitcoin's Hidden Yield: Why Options Are Taking Over Crypto | David Lawant, Anchorage Digital

DeFi's Near-Death Moment | Mike Silagadze on Ether.fi, Security, and What Comes Next

ERC-3643: The Case for Permissioned Tokens for Insitutional Adoption

Videos

Leo Phan on Building Cysic’s Community Compute Network

How Coinbase is Bridging Bitcoin to DeFi with New OnChain Lending | Will Robinson, VP of Engineering

Bill Barhydt: The Next Altcoin Season, $350K Bitcoin & The Future of DeFi Banking

Recent articles

MoneyGram CEO on rolling out MGUSD to its 60 million users, globally

🟢 LIVE - The Fable Backlash: Is This the Case for Decentralized AI?

Bitcoin's Hidden Yield: Why Options Are Taking Over Crypto | David Lawant, Anchorage Digital

Bitcoin does not have native yield. But that has not stopped institutions, treasury companies, miners, whales, ETFs, and crypto-native desks from looking for ways to generate returns on top of BTC. In this episode of Converge by The Defiant, David Lawant, Head of Research at Anchorage Digital, joins the show to unpack the rise of Bitcoin options, synthetic yield, covered call strategies, and the growing intersection between TradFi and crypto-native market structure.

DeFi's Near-Death Moment | Mike Silagadze on Ether.fi, Security, and What Comes Next

How close did DeFi come to a real systemic collapse? In this episode, Camila Russo sits down with Mike Silagadze, co-founder and CEO of Ether.fi, to break down the Kelp exploit, the DeFi United rescue effort, and why Mike believes the default path could have been far worse if nobody had stepped in. He explains why the bigger lesson is not just smart contract risk, but operational security, app-layer responsibility, and the need to move past "decentralization theater."

ERC-3643: The Case for Permissioned Tokens for Insitutional Adoption

What if the blockchain token you hold doesn't actually give you ownership of the underlying asset? Dennis O'Connell of the ERC-3643 Association joins Converge to expose the hidden differences between tokenization standards — and why knowing which one you're buying matters more than most people realize.

Bad Sentiment, Strong Fundamentals: the Institutional Turn | Chris Perkins, Franklin Crypto

Crypto is entering a new phase — and institutions, not retail, are driving it. As regulatory clarity arrives, the largest institutions in the world are moving from the sidelines into the market. The thesis from our guest: sentiment is poor, but fundamentals are improving; a coiled spring.

Top Talent Is Leaving the EF. What Happens to ETH Now?

Top Ethereum talent is leaving. The Ethereum Foundation is shrinking. And one question now hangs over the entire ecosystem: what happens to ETH if the EF steps back?

DeFi Yields Are Too Damn Low! Here's Why

DeFi is approaching a breaking point. After a wave of hacks and growing concerns around smart contract risk, liquidity risk, and hidden dependencies, the biggest question in crypto is no longer just how much yield you can earn, but whether that yield is actually worth the risk.

The $300M DeFi Bailout: Heroic or Unsustainable?

Explosive debate: after one of DeFi's biggest attacks left Aave facing bad debt, DeFi United raised more than $300M to stop the contagion. But did the ecosystem prove its strength - or expose hidden trust assumptions, opaque risk, and the need for a real DeFi backstop?

Should Arbitrum Have Frozen North Korea's Funds? Griff Green vs. Gabe Shapiro

The Arbitrum Security Council just made one of the most controversial decisions in DeFi history — freezing $70M in ETH stolen by North Korean hackers from the KelpDAO bridge exploit. But was it the right move? And what does it say about the systems we're building?