Trillions in Motion: How FalconX is Building Tomorrow's Financial Infrastructure (Ft. Raghu Yarlagadda)

Welcome to Season 2 of Total Value Unlocked. This season we'll be zooming in on Market Infrastructure: the foundational tools, systems, and platforms that power institutional digital asset markets from behind the scenes.

To kick off, our host, Matt Zhang, Founder of Hivemind Capital, sits down with Raghu Yarlagadda, Co-Founder and CEO of FalconX, one of the largest digital asset brokers:

We cover:

- Why tokenized dollars (stablecoins) may become the dominant settlement rail

- How FalconX scaled trillions in volume with only 25 ops staff

- Insights from attending the first-ever White House Digital Asset Summit.

- What “risk isolation” means and why it’s the missing piece

- The bold bets Raghu made in 2018 (2 out of 3 have already come true)

- The intersection of open-source AI and crypto incentives

Timestamps:

2:30 – The three pillars of FalconX and why derivatives are taking over

6:00 – Institutional conviction in Bitcoin and why it's growing

8:00 – What makes this market cycle structurally different

13:15 – Why consolidation is accelerating in crypto and how FalconX is navigating it

17:45 – The original 3 statements Raghu made in 2018—and how they’re playing out

20:45 – Inside the first-ever White House Digital Asset Summit

26:00 – The case for a fairer regulatory playing field in the U.S.

28:45 – Tokenization = a 10x efficiency boost for ops

33:30 – Why stablecoins will find PMF first in developing markets

36:00 – AI meets crypto: solving the open-source incentive problem

43:00 – The mindset that built FalconX into a market leader

44:30 – The missing piece in infrastructure: risk isolation