Why DeFi Must Stay in the Bill

Hosts Austin Campbell, Ram Ahluwalia, and Chris Perkins sit down with Patrick Witt, Executive Director of the President’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets at the White House, to break down the latest updates in the crypto market structure bill and the political calculus behind it.

Patrick discusses how Democrats have started to listen more actively, why DeFi remains one of the most complicated pieces of the bill, and how the administration is thinking about innovation versus incumbency. 

Later, the group turns to markets: whether the Fed is shifting regimes, why institutions move slowly but decisively, and what catalysts could matter most in the months ahead.

Sponsors:

• Walrus
  

Hosts:

• Ram Ahluwalia, CFA, CEO and Founder of Lumida

• Austin Campbell, NYU Stern professor and founder and managing partner of Zero Knowledge Consulting

• Christopher Perkins, Managing Partner and President of CoinFund

Guest:

• Patrick Witt, Executive Director of the President's Council of Advisors for Digital Assets at the White House

Timestamps:

• 🎬 0:00 Intro

• 🚀 2:45 Why Patrick calls the Senate Ag draft a “big step forward”

• 🧩 4:43 How the bill tackles DeFi—and why it’s so complex

• 🏛️ 5:28 Why the presidency is putting so much weight on crypto policy

• 📜 7:01 What happens behind the scenes to move a bill like this

• 🔪 9:39 Whether the bill could get modularized (including pulling DeFi out)

• 💡 11:22 Why Chris says crypto is simply a better product

• 📈 13:37 The short- and long-term implications of passing a market-structure bill

• 🔐 15:22 The KYC/AML problem in permissionless systems

• 🕵️‍♂️ 22:12 Privacy: finding the balance between user protection and public ledgers

• 🗳️ 24:08 How Democrats have increasingly joined the conversation

• 🌅 25:27 Why Patrick is optimistic we’ll get a Senate vote this year

• 🤖 29:56 How Patrick sees AI + crypto converging into a major opportunity

• 📊 32:23 What’s happening in markets, and whether a regime shift is underway

• 🏦 36:40 How institutions are entering, and what keeps them up at night

• 🎤 38:46 Why Ram calls the Cantor Conference the best for digital assets

• 💥 41:53 What Paolo Ardoino revealed about the future of Tether

• 📉 44:43 Signals that typically mark a market top and why spotting winners is so hard

• ⚡ 51:38 Ram’s key catalysts to watch for the next market leg

• 📺 54:39 Whether 60 Minutes misrepresented CZ

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