The Rollup

Sandy Kaul, Franklin Templeton’s Head of Digital Assets and Innovation, explores why institutions are building through crypto’s quiet period. She discusses tokenized funds, Franklin Templeton’s multibillion-dollar onchain ambitions, wallets evolving into AI-powered financial interfaces, event-based KYC, and the standards needed to connect global assets. She also highlights decentralized identity, agentic AI micropayments, and post-quantum security.

Alex Cutler, co-founder of Aerodrome, is building liquidity-focused DeFi infrastructure. He makes the case for an onchain NYSE, detailing Aero’s expansion across Base, Optimism, Arbitrum, Robinhood Chain, and Ethereum. They explore liquidity incentives, market-maker migration, tokenized stocks and FX, and why spot markets could become crypto’s biggest opportunity.

Sam Kazemian, founder and CEO of Frax, explores the rise of stablecoin-powered neobanks. He unveils FraxNet as an app store for cards, vaults, tokenized assets, and DeFi services. They discuss composable financial products, direct business custody, shared KYC across apps and chains, agent-style wallets, and FraxUSD’s role in a possible Q4 crypto rally.

Avalon Ingram, Digital Assets Business Lead at Swift, explores the leap from tokenization experiments to live institutional infrastructure. She discusses Swift’s blockchain ledger with 17 banks, unlocking trapped liquidity, Asia’s payments lead, and why stablecoins and tokenized deposits will coexist. The conversation also examines 24/7 settlement and Swift’s path from 17 banks to thousands.

Dan Romero, Tempo’s go-to-market lead and Farcaster co-founder, explores stablecoins’ leap from crypto infrastructure to global payments. They discuss regulatory clarity, enterprise adoption, private payment zones, and blockchain interoperability. Romero also shares ideas for real-time payroll, autonomous yield-seeking neobanks, agentic payments, and AI-powered social networks.

Krista Lynch, Grayscale’s Head of Trading and Capital Markets, explores Wall Street’s accelerating embrace of digital assets. She explains in-kind ETF creations, tax and estate advantages, collateral access, and Grayscale’s tokenized covered-call filings. Lynch also discusses advisors’ growing demand, the hurdles products must clear, and why Zcash may appeal as privacy-focused, AI-resistant money.

Arthur Hayes, BitMEX co-founder and Maelstrom CIO, explores the forces shaping crypto’s next major bull run. He discusses bank balance sheets, France as a potential liquidity catalyst, stablecoins exporting dollar power, and why AI agents could transform DeFi. He also weighs Bitcoin, Zcash, tokenization, privacy, sovereign debt, and his bold FLOP thesis for an agent-driven economy.

Illia Polosukhin, co-founder and CEO of NEAR Protocol and NEAR AI, co-authored the paper that introduced transformer AI. He explores NEAR Intents as a market of markets spanning crypto and stocks, universal cross-chain liquidity, lending against perpetuals, and agentic finance. He also explains NEAR’s post-quantum architecture, private AI ambitions, and a future where accounts securely hold assets across multiple chains.

Keone Hon, co-founder of high-performance blockchain Monad, explores why retail users, degens, and Wall Street can thrive on the same network. He discusses Monad’s from-scratch architecture, the tension between privacy and composability, MEV challenges, and the biggest lesson from mainnet: move faster.

Anthony Pecore, Franklin Templeton’s digital-asset leader behind Benji, joins Seth Ginns, CIO of Franklin Crypto and former equities investor. They explore why liquid equities and treasuries may lead tokenization, how Benji made on-chain money market funds practical, and the infrastructure needed for 24/7 finance. They also examine AI-powered capital management and a future where assets live in wallets, not accounts.