Bits and Borders

Christian Catalini is a co-founder of Lightspark, co-creator of Libra and founder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab. He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss why AI is making intelligence cheap while verification remains scarce, and how businesses can compete by owning proprietary information and standing behind AI-generated work. They also discuss why he expects most everyday agentic commerce to use existing payment rails, with a potential role for crypto in small, cross-border machine-to-machine payments. You can connect with Christian Catalini on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ccatalini/ Connect with Aaron Stanley on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronstanley27/ For editorial and sponsorship inquiries: aaron@promenadeadvisory.com

Welcome to the Intent Layer, a special Bits and Borders miniseries exploring the agentic finance frontier Our first episode is with Erik Reppel: creator of x402, a Coinbase advisor on agentic commerce and the former head of engineering at Coinbase Developer Platform. He joins host Aaron Stanley live from Ai4 to discuss how pay-per-use payments let agents buy data, content and API access while completing a task, without requiring a separate subscription or account for every service they use. Reppel explains how this access could give agents a changing set of capabilities as new services become available, and describes the “agentic premium” he has observed among API customers willing to pay more per request to avoid account setup and prefunding. The conversation also covers why stablecoins work for small transactions, where credit cards still offer advantages, and how publishers could charge agents for content while continuing to serve ads to human readers. Reppel closes with a practical suggestion: give an agent a small payment budget and try a transaction to see how access to paid services changes what it can do. Chapters: 00:00 Introduction 01:20 Erik’s background and the x402 Foundation 02:40 What x402 does and the HTTP 402 status code 04:51 Conversational commerce versus autonomous commerce 07:42 Agent budgets, stablecoins and credit cards 11:02 Micropayments and new business models 12:06 Dynamic tool access and the agentic premium 16:19 Why payment companies are backing open standards 19:57 Give your agent a payment budget You can connect with Erik on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikreppel/ Subscribe to Bits and Borders: https://bitsborders.substack.com/ For editorial and sponsorship inquires, please contact aaron@promenadeadvisory.com

Rony Vernet is an electronic engineer, physics researcher and Brazi's leading UAP researcher. He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss his argument that the race for artificial intelligence may also be a race to reverse-engineer UAP technology. Rony recounts his own close encounters and investigations in Varginha, the Amazon, the Atacama Desert and Antarctica. They also examine what broader disclosure could mean for national security, energy markets, government credibility and humanity’s understanding of consciousness. You can connect with Rony Vernet on X/Twitter For editorial and sponsorship inquiries: aaron@promenadeadvisory.com

Kristin Smith is President of the Solana Policy Institute. She joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss why the Clarity Act stalled in the US Senate. Kristin explains how the politics around President Trump, opposition from the banking lobby and a shifting Democratic electorate derailed the bill, and why she believes the industry still came out ahead as the SEC and CFTC move to write rules on their own. They also discuss the risk of a political backlash and crypto's shift toward financial infrastructure. You can connect with Kristin Smith on LinkedIn For editorial and sponsorship enquiries: aaron@promenadeadvisory.comSubscribe to Bits and Borders : Bits and Borders is presented by Sumsub Sumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub's internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub's customer base. Read the full report here :

Marcos Allende is CEO and co-founder of Blerify. He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss why AI is making passwords, selfie checks and passport scans obsolete as a way to prove identity online. Marcos explains how Blerify's identity wallets and blockchain-based trust registry allow digital IDs to be verified across borders, and why companies and governments need to adopt post-quantum cryptography now. The conversation also covers where quantum computing stands in 2026 and what it could unlock beyond breaking encryption.You can connect with Marcos on LinkedIn -------------------------------------------------------------- Bits and Borders is presented by SumsubSumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub's internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub's customer base.Read the full report here : Connect with Aaron Stanley on LinkedIn : Follow Bits and Borders on LinkedIn : Follow Bits and Borders on X For editorial and sponsorship enquiries: aaron@promenadeadvisory.com

Didier Lavallée is the CEO of Tetra Digital Group, the Canadian trust company behind CAD Digital (CADD), a Canadian dollar stablecoin that launched in May. He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss why Canada went so long without a usable domestic stablecoin, and how Tetra grew out of the QuadrigaCX collapse into the country's first qualified digital asset custodian. They get into the early demand for CADD in remittances, US trade flows and domestic settlement, and why the lack of real-time rails in Canada is pushing treasury desks toward programmatic payments. Didier also makes the case for non-USD stablecoins and for Canadian-owned financial infrastructure at a tense moment with Washington. Connect with Didier on LinkedIn Connect with Aaron on Linkedin -------------------------------------------------------- Bits and Borders is presented by Sumsub Sumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub's internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub's customer base. Read the full report here

Alvin Kan is the COO of Bitget Wallet. He joins host Aaron Stanley at Blockchain Rio to discuss the shift from crypto wallet to everyday finance app, where users save, spend and invest dollars in one place. In August, daily payment transactions on the wallet overtook daily trading transactions for the first time in its eight-year history. Kan explains why he expects payments and trading apps to converge, how demand differs across Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America, and why he thinks newcomers rather than incumbent institutions will win the stablecoin era. Connect with Alvin Kan on LinkedIn Connect with Aaron Stanley on Linkedin Subscribe to Bits and Borders newsletter ----------------------------------------------------------------- Bits and Borders is presented by Sumsub Sumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub's internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub's customer base. Read the full report here: https://sumsub.com/crypto-industry-report-2026/?utm_source=promenade&utm_medium=media&utm_campaign=crypto-report_report_2026

Gean Chu is a partner at Honey Island Capital. He joins host Aaron Stanley for a deep dive on quantum computing, which has become one of the main factors weighing on crypto markets in 2026. Gean breaks down the March paper from Google Quantum AI that cut the estimated hardware requirement for breaking Bitcoin twentyfold, explains why roughly 6.9 million bitcoins already have their public keys exposed on chain, and argues the harder problem is the coins sitting in Satoshi-era wallets that nobody can move. He also lays out the mitigation plans under discussion, the realistic timelines, and why he thinks the risk is already priced in. You can connect with Gean Chu on LinkedIn Subscribe to Bits and Borders on Substack ------------------------------------------------------------------- Bits and Borders is presented by Sumsub Sumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub's internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub's customer base. Read the full report here :

Raagulan Pathy is the CEO of Kast. He joins host Aaron Stanley at Blockchain Rio 2026, a year after his first appearance and roughly $80 million in Series A funding later. Rags explains why he thinks the stablecoin neobank market is winner take most, why Kast scrapped its planned token airdrop in favor of equity, and what the company found when 20 to 30% of its users started running business spend through a consumer card. He also makes the case that Latin America has the strongest product-market fit for stablecoins anywhere in the world. You can connect with Rags on LinkedIn --------------------------------------------------------------------- Bits and Borders is presented by Sumsub Sumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub's internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub's customer base. Read the full report here: https://sumsub.com/crypto-industry-report-2026/?utm_source=promenade&utm_medium=media&utm_campaign=crypto-report_report_2026

Ilya Brovin is Chief Growth Officer of Sumsub. He joins host Aaron Stanley at Bitso Business' Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City to discuss how AI is changing identity fraud. Sumsub onboards 12 to 15 million people a month, and Brovin describes a clear shift over the past year: criminals have stopped faking documents by hand and started training agents to attempt verification programmatically, at machine speed and scale. The conversation covers why deepfake detection alone does not work, what reusable identity looks like in practice, and how verification changes when the customer is an agent rather than a person. You can connect with Ilya Brovin on LinkedIn -------------------------------------------------------------------- Bits and Borders is presented by Sumsub Sumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub's internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub's customer base. Read the full report here :

Yatharth Sejpal and Brian Li are co-founder/CEO and co-founder/CTO of Knowidea. They join host Aaron Stanley at the Ai4 Conference in Las Vegas to discuss why they're betting on formally verified, deterministic AI instead of the 95 percent confidence models most companies accept. The two explain their neurosymbolic architecture, which forces AI agents to produce a mathematical proof for every output, and why that distinction matters for agentic payments and fraud prevention. They also share use cases spanning oil and gas, wealth management, and M&A. You can connect with Yatharth Sejpal and Brian Li on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/yatharth-sejpal/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/zhengyu-brian-li/ Subscribe to Bits and Borders on Substack

Luca Prosperi is CEO and co-founder of M0. He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss the state of stablecoin infrastructure in 2026, two years after his first appearance on the show. They cover the wallet-centric shift in finance, the fight over stablecoin yield, and why Prosperi thinks local-currency stablecoins, not on-chain FX, will be the next big trend. Prosperi also breaks down what M0's partnerships with PayPal, MoneyGram, and MetaMask reveal about where stablecoin infrastructure is headed. You can connect with Luca on LinkedIn Subscribe to Bits and Borders on Substack ---------------------------------------------------------------- Bits and Borders is presented by Sumsub Sumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub's internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub's customer base. Read the full report here:

Joao Reginatto of M0, Monica Ramirez of Anchorage Digital, Olivia Vande Woude of Ava Labs, and Sheraz Shere of Solana Foundation join host Aaron Stanley at the Bitso Business Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City to discuss stablecoin readiness and the gap between corporate intent and implementation. The tech and the regulatory picture have mostly caught up, but companies are still stuck on accounting treatment, internal buy-in, and a shortage of talent that understands both crypto and traditional finance. The panel covers real examples like MoneyGram's board approval process and OpenTrade's work winning over CFOs, then closes with a lightning round of bold predictions on where stablecoins go next. You can connect with Joao Reginatto , Monica Ramirez , Olivia Vande Woude , and Sheraz Shere on LinkedIn Subscribe to Bits and Borders on ⁠Substack⁠ ------------------------------------------------- Bits and Borders is presented by Sumsub Sumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub's internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub's customer base. Read the full report ⁠here⁠ :

Olivia Vande Woude is Tokenization Lead at Ava Labs. She joins host Aaron Stanley at Bitso's Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City to discuss why distribution, not issuance, is the hardest problem left to solve in tokenized real world assets. We talk through Open Trade's B2B2C stablecoin yield model gaining traction across LATAM and APAC, a coming wave of consolidation among crypto neobanks and card issuers, and why real utility metrics matter more than vanity numbers You can connect with Olivia on Linkedin Subscribe to Bits and Borders on Substack ------------------------------------------------- Bits and Borders is presented by Sumsub Sumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub's internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub's customer base. Read the full report here : ⁠

Guillermo Goncalvez is CEO of El Dorado. He joins host Aaron Stanley at Bitso's Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City to discuss El Dorado's new $9 million Series A round, led by Paradigm with Coinbase Ventures participating. Goncalvez explains how El Dorado is taking the liquidity network it built serving over a million consumers across Latin America and redeploying it for a new B2B product aimed at import and export businesses. They also talk about the wave of foreign investor interest opening up in Venezuela. You can connect with Guillermo Goncalvez on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/guillermogoncalvez/ Bits and Borders is presented by Sumsub Sumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub's internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub's customer base. Read the full report here: https://sumsub.com/crypto-industry-report-2026/?utm_source=promenade&utm_medium=media&utm_campaign=crypto-report_report_2026

Rafael Luz and Bernardo Brites are co-founders of Trace Finance, a Brazilian cross-border payments infrastructure company. They join host Aaron Stanley at the Bitso Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City to discuss the company's $32 million Series A and the launch of a BRL-backed stablecoin. The company recently raised a $32 million round led by CoinFund, with Coinbase Ventures, Jump, Paxos, and others. Trace is launching what it expects to be the largest BRL-backed stablecoin, aimed at giving global companies access to Brazilian real for the first time without running into Brazil's capital controls. You can connect with Bernardo and Rafael on Linkedin ------------------------------------------------------- Bits and Borders is presented by Sumsub Sumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub’s internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub’s customer base. Read the full report here :

Ezra Kebrab is co-founder of Caliza. He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss cross-border stablecoin payments in Latin America. Recorded live at the Bitso Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City. Caliza handles cross-border supplier and treasury payments, with most volume flowing between Brazil, Mexico, China, Hong Kong, and the US. Kebrab traces his path from Visa, where he watched Pix transform real-time payments in Brazil, to founding Caliza five years ago on a stablecoin-first model built on top of traditional banking infrastructure. He explains why Caliza has grown 40-60% month over month, why he doesn't view stablecoin rails as a replacement for Swift, and why workflow and local compliance knowledge are what actually win customer trust. He also shares his read on agentic commerce, where he sees the near-term opportunity in back-office reconciliation rather than consumer payments. Caliza is expanding into Africa and Asia in the coming months. You can connect with Ezra on Linkedin

Robson Silva Junior is Co-Founder of Pods. He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss how DeFi's mixed retail adoption led Pods to build modular yield infrastructure for Latin America's neobanks. Recorded live at the Token Nation event in São Paulo, the conversation traces Silva's path from naval engineering to early AMM research during Singapore's ICO era. Silva explains why Pods abandoned its B2C options protocol once it became clear retail users weren't going to interact with MetaMask directly. He also discusses Pods' work building a zero-knowledge privacy pilot for Brazil's central bank digital currency, and why programmable privacy for composable DeFi remains unsolved. The episode closes on how neobanks now use Pods' API to offer insured, cross-chain yield without building that infrastructure in-house. You can connect with Rob on Linkedin

Jack Chong is co-founder and CEO of Checker, a stablecoin liquidity network connecting FX banks, payments companies, and neobanks across emerging markets. He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss why cross-border stablecoin payments are still broken, and how Checker is building the infrastructure layer to fix it. Chong's path from Hong Kong to Oxford to a language school in Jordan to building stablecoin rails in New York and Latin America is not a straight line, but it explains exactly why Checker is built the way it is: global product, local execution, regional investors with boots on the ground. In its first 12 months, the network processed over $3 billion in payment volume. Chong breaks down the Brazil-China corridor, where most cross-border business payments still run through informal brokers, and makes the case for why Brazil's VASP regulation arriving in Q4 is a pivotal moment for any institution that wants to offer stablecoin products. He also floats an intriguing idea: stablecoins as the conduit that opens the BRL carry trade, long a Wall Street macro favorite, to crypto natives and retail investors.

David Z. Morris is a financial journalist and author of S tealing the Future , a post-trial account of the FTX collapse and the effective altruism ideology behind it. He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss what the criminal trial revealed that earlier books missed, why Michael Lewis's account functionally serves as a defense of the fraud, and how the ideology that shaped Sam Bankman-Fried continues to circulate under new names. Morris was part of the CoinDesk team that broke the story and later covered the trial for Protos. Topics include the SBF truther movement, speculative but documented questions about Sullivan & Cromwell's intelligence connections, Caroline Ellison's story, stimulant culture at FTX, and how effective altruism has rebranded as "abundance" and "effective accelerationism." Morris argues that EA gave SPF an ethical framework that explicitly justified stealing customer funds - and that the same logic is still being sold to engineers in Silicon Valley today.