Podcast

Robinhood just launched its own blockchain — and the numbers are wild. Seong Lee, Head of Product for Robinhood Crypto, joins Chris Storaker to explain how Robinhood Chain went from zero to 200 million transactions in a month, why permissionless stock tokens can now be redeemed even if Robinhood disappears, and how everyday users are earning yield through a fully insured DeFi lending product. A must-watch conversation on the future of tokenized finance, meme coins, and real-world assets on chain.

DTCC holds $114 trillion in assets. On July 15th, it showed the world how those assets can be converted into digital tokens, traded in real production conditions, and converted back — without disrupting anything.

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.

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?

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.

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."

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.

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 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 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.