In this episode of The Blockopedia podcast, LBank VP of Marketing and Partnerships Kaia Wong sat down with The Blockopedia co founder Mohammad Ahmad Khan to talk about scaling a global exchange to 55 million users across 210 countries, why LBank partnered with Pudgy Penguins and Nobody Sausage, and what actually separates an early listing from a reckless one.

Kaia‘s path into crypto started during her studies in London, where an early curiosity about Bitcoin led her and a group of partners into global expansion, growth and fundraising work after graduation. That work put her in the room for one of crypto’s largest raises, Telegram Open Network’s roughly two billion dollar fundraising effort, which is where she first connected with LBank. Nearly five years later, she has helped grow the exchange more than tenfold, shifting her own focus increasingly toward VIP ecosystem partnerships and commercial strategy as she came to see users and partners as an exchange’s most valuable asset.

Three Things LBank Leans On

Asked what separates LBank in an increasingly crowded exchange landscape, Kaia pointed to three pillars: early access to credible new assets before they are fully priced in, genuine liquidity depth in smaller and newer tokens rather than just the usual BTC and ETH pairs everyone already offers, and a brand culture she described as more open and vibrant than most competitors, something the Pudgy Penguins and Nobody Sausage partnerships have only reinforced.

Going Global Without a Copy Paste Playbook

Scaling into 210 plus countries taught the team that global growth cannot follow a single template. Trading habits, product preferences, and even how users build trust in a platform vary significantly by market, which means localization has to go far deeper than translation, extending into product priorities, support models and campaign design shaped by close relationships with local partners.

What Actually Gets a Token Listed

Kaia broke down LBank’s vetting process into three layers: project quality, including team credibility and verifiable token economics; real market data like genuine user activity, capital flow and holder distribution; and timing, since even a strong project can be wrong for the market at a given moment. Her line for distinguishing early from reckless was direct: early is when data leads, reckless is when hype leads, and delisting happens quickly if a listed project starts showing signs of harming users.

Why Culture Became a Strategic Bet

With trading products across exchanges converging, Kaia argued that culture is what builds loyalty beyond the trade itself. Pudgy Penguins brings warmth and belonging, Nobody Sausage brings humor and creativity, and together they signal a younger, more human side of LBank’s brand. She was careful to draw a line, though: these partnerships don’t turn LBank into an entertainment brand, security and asset integrity remain the foundation, culture just gives users a reason to stay.

On avoiding the trap of sponsorships feeling like empty logo placements, Kaia said LBank is selective about partners specifically because forced fits are obvious to users immediately, and the bar is whether a partnership creates real value for a community rather than simply borrowing its attention.

Stocks, Security and the Bigger Picture

LBank’s push into US equity linked products and pre-IPO access, spanning more than 300 stock and ETF offerings accessible through a single USDT balance, reflects what Kaia called a broader opening of global liquidity rather than a simple grab at TradFi’s existing market. On security, following a string of high profile industry failures, she pointed to LBank’s multi layer security architecture, ISO IEC certification, and a newly established 100 million dollar futures risk protection fund, summarizing the philosophy simply: no trust, no trade.

Where She Sees the Next Wave Coming From

Rather than betting on any single narrative, Kaia expects the next phase of adoption to come from real world assets, application layer products and AI converging in practical, user facing ways rather than existing as separate hype cycles.

Rapid Fire

Asked to choose in a word, Kaia picked futures over spot for where the real action is right now, said LBank is building primarily for Web3 native users looking to cross into TradFi, called bear markets the real proving ground for brand trust, and ultimately described LBank not as an exchange or a brand, but as an ecosystem.

Watch the full conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgMSfjc2Btw&t=1s

In this episode of The Blockopedia podcast, TransFi VP of Risk and Compliance Payaswani Shukla sat down with The Blockopedia’s co-founder Mohammad Ahmad Khan to talk about building compliance infrastructure across 70 plus countries, why stablecoin payments raise the compliance bar rather than lower it, and what young professionals need to focus on to build a career in crypto compliance.

Payaswani‘s entry into fintech compliance happened, in her own words, almost by accident. Starting out in KYC, KYB and light AML work, she moved through fintech, Web3 and payments companies before landing at TransFi, drawn in by the specific challenge stablecoin native payments create: transactions settle near instantly, which means compliance checks that used to happen after a transfer now have to happen at the same moment money moves. Her CAMS certification, she said, became the anchor that turned a series of roles into a genuine specialization in AML.

Here are the key points from the conversation.

1. KYC is only the starting line, not the finish. Payaswani was direct about a common misconception, that completing KYC means a platform is compliant. The real work, she said, happens in ongoing transaction monitoring, especially now that sophisticated fraud, including deepfakes used to pass identity verification, can slip through onboarding entirely. Catching that requires layered controls, like flagging a user claiming to be in Nigeria suddenly transacting from the Philippines.

2. TransFi operates as a B2B and B2B2C payments platform across roughly 70 countries and 200 plus payment methods, moving money for businesses whose end customers benefit indirectly through that infrastructure.

3. There is no single global compliance rulebook. Payaswani described building compliance frameworks across dozens of jurisdictions as inherently non uniform, each with its own regulators, sanctions lists (OFAC, EU, and others) and reporting obligations. What stays consistent across geographies, she said, is the core AML and transaction monitoring architecture; what changes is reporting and regulatory expectations layered on top.

4. Compliance is a business enabler, not a blocker. Pushing back directly on the idea that compliance slows crypto innovation, Payaswani argued the opposite is true with stablecoins: because settlement is near instant, there is no window to catch problems after the fact, so compliance has to be built in from the start rather than treated as a gate at the end.

5. AI is supplementing judgment, not replacing it. Payaswani described how AI can compress hours of manual transaction analysis into seconds by surfacing historical patterns and prior decisions, dramatically reducing the analyst headcount needed for cross border monitoring. She was careful to frame this as augmentation rather than automation of judgment itself, AI flags and suggests, humans still decide.

6. Building compliance from day one beats bolting it on later. Her advice to startups and projects entering the space was blunt: never build products in isolation from compliance. Teams that put product, operations, leadership and compliance in the same room from the start move faster than teams that build first and ask compliance to sign off afterward.

7. The skill that matters most going forward is technical adaptability. Payaswani’s advice to anyone entering crypto compliance today was to stay technically fluent, not just regulation fluent. A compliance professional who understands product and technical architecture, she said, can shape a system proactively rather than reacting to problems after launch.

Payaswani also spoke personally about relocating from India to Dubai while raising a young child, describing the transition as one that forced her to become sharply more efficient and organized, turning what could have been a limitation into something that shaped how she now operates at a senior leadership level.

Watch the full conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnXF6R92R70

In this episode of The Blockopedia podcast, Spout co founder and CEO Marc sat down with The Blockopedia co founder Mohammad Ahmad Khan to talk about leaving investment banking for crypto, why tokenized stocks alone are not the real unlock, and how Spout is trying to give retail traders access to a borrowing structure once reserved for billionaires.

Marc‘s path into crypto started the way it did for a lot of people in 2017, watching classmates trade during the ICO craze and deciding he had to get in himself. That curiosity carried through DeFi summer, a pile of now worthless NFTs, and eventually into a TMT investment banking career where he worked on deals like the ARM IPO while quietly funneling income into crypto side bets. After a few years, he left banking to build full time, meeting his future collaborators through an Aptos accelerator program before eventually landing on the idea that became Spout.

Why Tokenization Alone Isn’t the Real Unlock

Marc’s core thesis is straightforward but sharp: simply wrapping a stock as a token doesn’t create meaningful new value, since anyone with capital can already open a brokerage account and trade the underlying asset directly. The real opportunity, he argued, is doing something on chain that traditional finance structurally cannot offer off chain. For Spout, that means running an investment strategy on deposited equities to subsidize lender returns, allowing the platform to offer 0% interest borrowing against stocks, a structure normally reserved for large institutions and ultra high net worth clients through prime brokerage arrangements.

From Flip Vault to Spout

Before Spout, Marc built Flip Vault, a peer to peer liquidity sourcing platform aimed at reducing cross chain bridging fees. He eventually stepped away from it after concluding the revenue model was a race to the bottom, with little defensible moat once other platforms could copy the infrastructure. That experience shaped how deliberately he approached Spout’s positioning around a harder to replicate financial structure rather than pure infrastructure plumbing.

Managing Risk Like TradFi, Not Like Crypto

Marc was candid about the tail risk built into lending against equities, particularly around after hours price gaps that could expose lenders to sudden losses. Spout’s answer borrows directly from traditional finance: an insurance fund, a protocol treasury, and a tranching system that separates senior and junior risk, so junior tranche holders absorb losses first in exchange for higher yield. He framed this explicitly as importing structures that exist off chain for good reason, rather than the looser experimentation he sees across much of DeFi that tends to work until a black swan event wipes it out.

Why Real Time Pricing Is Harder Than It Looks

Unlike Bitcoin or Solana, which trade continuously with deep liquidity, equities still have relatively thin price discovery even during extended trading hours. Marc explained that this thinness makes some platforms’ push toward 24/7 equity trading riskier than it appears, since liquid names like Apple could still swing unpredictably after hours and trigger liquidations that shouldn’t happen. Spout is deliberately holding off on expanding beyond standard market hours until the underlying infrastructure matures.

Choosing Solana Over Ethereum L2s

Marc’s reasoning for building on Solana centered on avoiding fragmentation. Rather than betting on an Ethereum layer two that could become obsolete if Ethereum mainnet eventually scales the way Vitalik Buterin has suggested it will, he preferred Solana’s single chain design, along with what he sees as the ecosystem’s growing seriousness around real world assets and institutional infrastructure rather than purely retail speculation.

What the Testnet Is Really For

Spout’s testnet, launching soon, is less about generating flashy signup numbers and more about tracking real user behavior, where people get confused, which explanations need simplifying, and where the product might feel too good to be true without enough context. Marc expects the feedback quality to improve further once private beta mainnet goes live with real capital at stake, since he says user behavior shifts meaningfully once actual money is on the line.

Milestones Worth Watching

Beyond the testnet, Marc pointed to total value locked from both borrowers and lenders, plus a growing list of equity integrations including Ondo, xStocks, Binance’s stock offering, and Dinari’s dShares, as the clearest signals of Spout’s traction. Conversations are also underway to offer Spout’s lending and borrowing directly through centralized exchanges, though he declined to share specifics before anything is finalized.

Raising Capital in a Crowded Tokenization Market

Marc said the investors who understood Spout’s pitch immediately were the ones who already recognized that tokenization infrastructure alone has become saturated, with players like Securitize, Ondo and Backpack all competing for the same narrow slice of volume. The harder conversations, he said, came from investors too firmly rooted in either pure TradFi or pure DeFi thinking to grasp a product deliberately built in the overlap between both worlds.

Watch the full conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BKtSmra3hI

In this episode of The Blockopedia podcast, LuvKaizen founder and CEO Matt sat down with The Blockopedia’s co founder Mohammad Ahmad Khan to unpack nearly a decade of Web3 marketing experience, from the ICO era’s advisory boom to today’s KOL campaigns, and to explain why most crypto projects are still spending their marketing budgets on the wrong things entirely.

Matt‘s road into Web3 marketing started almost nine years ago, during the first ICO boom of 2017. Back then, his first agency, KHQ, connected projects raising millions with advisors, a business that naturally evolved into KOL and influencer marketing as the industry’s needs shifted. That agency eventually grew into LuvKaizen, a full circle marketing operation spanning strategy, KOL campaigns, PR and, increasingly, AI driven automation. Matt credits the shift less to planning and more to simply following where the industry’s real pain points kept moving.

Product Comes Before Promotion

Asked what separates projects that actually grow from those that just spend heavily on marketing, Matt didn’t hesitate: usage. He pointed to Ethereum as the clearest example, a network that kept iterating on real technical problems like fees and speed rather than relying on hype cycles to carry it. Most ICO era projects that failed to stick, he argued, had plenty of marketing spend but nothing underneath it worth returning to.

The Problem With Performance Based KOL Deals

Matt was candid about a structural tension currently playing out across exchange marketing. Many partnership teams want KOLs to generate large trading volume commitments while offering minimal upfront payment, an arrangement he said rarely attracts serious influencers who already understand their own value. He described the exchange marketing space as particularly volatile, with shifting affiliate terms and, at times, frozen funds, which is part of why LuvKaizen leans toward stable upfront fees rather than pure performance based arrangements.

Why Airdrop Farming Died

Looking back at what worked in crypto marketing years ago but doesn’t anymore, Matt pointed directly at the old airdrop distribution model, projects handing large token allocations to accounts with big followings, many of which turned out to be bot farms with zero real engagement. The lesson he’s carried forward is blunt: know exactly where your actual audience sits and what they’re reading, rather than chasing raw follower counts.

What Metrics Actually Matter

Beyond basic impressions and likes, Matt said LuvKaizen tracks engagement quality and bot activity through multiple internal tools, since surface level metrics alone can mask campaigns that generate visibility without generating real users. The KOLs who move the needle long term, he noted, are the ones tied to a project for months rather than a single post, building the kind of ongoing trust comparable to an athlete’s long running brand endorsement.

Where AI Fits Into Marketing Now

Matt estimated roughly 90 percent of KOL sourcing, reporting, and campaign management work is headed toward automation, a shift LuvKaizen is already building into its own self service platform. What won’t be automated, in his view, is strategic know how, creative direction, and the actual copy and visuals that make a campaign resonate. He sees this playing out at a much larger scale too, predicting that within five to ten years, autonomous AI agents rather than human teams may be the ones actually running major token launches and treasuries.

What a Real Campaign Budget Looks Like

For founders wondering what a serious KOL test campaign costs, Matt was specific: he recommends starting around $10,000, distributed across 20 to 30 KOLs to generate enough content variety to actually test messaging and calls to action. Pricing scales heavily by tier, from roughly $200 per post at the smaller end to $10,000 or more for top tier creators delivering threads and multiple placements. For projects with tighter budgets, he pointed to an underused alternative: SEO and PR, calling high intent, low competition keywords one of the most overlooked growth channels still available in crypto.

Looking Ahead

Matt remains bullish despite the current bear market, pointing to decentralized exchange volume that’s already roughly ten times higher than the last cycle’s peak, and predicting a possible resurgence in digital collectibles alongside the rise of agentic, AI driven trading. His closing advice to founders watching echoed something close to Steve Jobs: stay hungry, keep shipping, and remember that most marketing that actually goes viral costs nothing but a genuinely good idea.

Watch the full conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkqvnGtFBY4

In this episode of The Blockopedia podcast, Venom Foundation CEO Christopher Lewis sat down with The Blockopedia’s co founder Mohammad Ahmad Khan to trace a career that runs from building Apple’s earliest software duplication systems in the 1980s through chip design, medical devices, and now institutional blockchain infrastructure, and to explain why he thinks the biggest skill for the next five years is simply knowing how to use AI well.

Lewis has spent, by his own reluctant admission, more than four decades in technology, starting at Apple Computer in the 1980s building the rack systems that duplicated floppy disks loaded with operating software. From there his path wound through Texas Instruments, where he helped design some of the earliest single chip mobile phones, a set top box startup in London that pivoted its entire business model based on a single newspaper headline about UK spectrum regulation, a medical device company that has since treated more than 120 million dental patients, and eventually into blockchain through Bitcoin, which he first encountered around 2015.

Here are the moments from the conversation worth sitting with.

1. Apple’s early culture shaped how he thinks about distributed systems today. Lewis described a young, entrepreneurial environment where a new hire with an untested idea could get a budget and a green light within days. That same distributed computing philosophy, he argued, echoes directly in how Venom‘s blockchain architecture spreads computational work rather than concentrating it, a thread he traced explicitly back to his earliest Apple projects.

2. A newspaper headline once saved his company. In the 1990s, Lewis and his co-founder were deep into building internet browsing boxes when they read a Financial Times report suggesting the UK government would shut down terrestrial TV bandwidth far sooner than expected. They pivoted immediately, built inexpensive set top boxes instead, sold millions through supermarkets, and turned that decision into the exit that eventually let Lewis retire to Switzerland. He offered it as a case study in reading market signals fast enough to act on them before they become obvious to everyone else.

3. Venom exists to be financial infrastructure for institutions and sovereign nations, not another consumer ecosystem. Lewis was clear that Venom deliberately pivoted away from the games, NFTs and general purpose ecosystem features it launched with between 2022 and 2023, refocusing entirely on financial infrastructure by 2024. The goal, he said, is enabling central banks and commercial banks to settle value over blockchain rather than legacy rails like Swift, at speeds and reliability levels that scale to hundreds of millions of users.

4. The recent Triko migration standardizes Venom on the TON network’s virtual machine. Built on the same cell based architecture developed by the Durov brothers, the migration took over a year of testing and gave outside engineers, including those building on Telegram and TON, a shared toolset to build on Venom directly. Lewis does not see TVM and EVM as competing standards long term; he expects both to coexist, much like Mac and Windows both running the same Word document.

5. He believes AI agents will soon transact with each other directly on blockchain, in fractions of a cent. Lewis pointed to Jack Dorsey’s old prediction that Bitcoin would become the money of the internet, arguing it is finally becoming visible: AI agents negotiating and paying each other in nano-value transactions too small for traditional payment rails to handle economically.

6. His advice to builders has shifted in the last two years. Where he once would have led with adaptability and letting go of a flawed thesis, Lewis now puts AI fluency first, warning that treating AI as a buzzword to bolt onto a pitch deck is the modern equivalent of slapping “.com” onto a business name in the 1990s. He urged founders to focus tightly on their actual area of expertise rather than chasing every trend at once.

7. Off-ramps, not on-ramps, are what Venom most wants builders to solve. Asked what kind of projects would most excite him, Lewis named the friction of converting crypto back into usable, spendable value as the single biggest pain point left in the ecosystem, and one he expects to matter even more once regulatory clarity fully lands.

Lewis closed by describing a document Venom has just finished on standardizing how blockchain transaction speed is measured, an attempt, he said, to give the industry something like a common speedometer so competing throughput claims can actually be compared apples to apples.

Watch the full conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WarBTGYsdso

In this episode of The Blockopedia podcast, Palladium Labs founder and CEO Akash Gaurav sat down with The Blockopedia’s Co-founder Mohammad Ahmad Khan to talk about his path from IIT Bombay to Bitcoin arbitrage to building institutional grade financial infrastructure, and why he believes financing assets matters just as much as tokenizing them.

Akash Gaurav‘s journey began far from crypto. Raised in a middle class family in Patna, he grew up around small scale entrepreneurship through his father’s textile business, but technology and startups were not part of the world around him until he arrived at IIT Bombay. Joining the college’s Innovation Cell in his first year, working on an autonomous car project, and watching peers build ambitious things reshaped what he expected of himself after graduation.

His introduction to Bitcoin came almost by accident, through a passing mention in a cryptography class taught by a professor who had personally received the Bitcoin whitepaper from Satoshi Nakamoto. That offhand comment sent Gaurav down a rabbit hole back in his dorm room in 2014, years before most of his peers, or most of India, had heard the word Bitcoin at all. He soon turned that early conviction into something practical, spotting a Bitcoin price gap between Indian and European markets and using banking channels through his brother in Italy to capture arbitrage profits for a couple of years before the market became too efficient for a college student to compete in.

What Government Certificates Taught Him About Institutions

Before Palladium, Gaurav built Auxesis, one of India’s earliest enterprise blockchain companies, working with NITI Aayog on tamper resistant, blockchain based certificates. The real lesson from that work, he said, was not about blockchain at all. It was about how large institutions actually adopt new technology: not because it is exciting, but because it reduces friction in existing workflows and manages risk within processes that already exist. That insight has stayed with him through every company since.

From a Personal Bitcoin Problem to Palladium Labs

Palladium Labs grew out of a problem Gaurav faced himself. After selling his first company, he converted most of the proceeds into Bitcoin, and over subsequent market cycles kept running into the same frustration: holding a valuable asset with no good way to put it to work without selling it. That question, how do you build better credit around Bitcoin, expanded as tokenized treasuries, equities and funds increasingly moved on chain. Gaurav realized the real gap was not tokenization itself but the financial infrastructure needed to actually use those tokenized assets, through borrowing, collateral markets and liquidity.

Why Canton, Not Ethereum or Solana

Institutional finance demands privacy and settlement certainty that public blockchains generally cannot offer, since banks cannot broadcast their positions and counterparties the way DeFi protocols do. Canton Network’s combination of private, atomic settlement with Daml’s ability to express financial agreements like loans, repos and derivatives in their native form is what convinced Gaurav to build Palladium’s entire stack on top of it rather than a more conventional public chain.

Alpine and the Genesis Fund

Palladium’s money market product, Alpine, lets users supply assets, earn yield, and borrow against their holdings without selling them, the same logic Gaurav applies personally to his own Bitcoin. Beyond serving users directly, Alpine is meant to become shared infrastructure other builders can plug into rather than reconstructing credit and liquidity engines from scratch. That thinking led to Palladium’s Genesis Fund, a 10 million dollar grants program for financial builders on Canton, launched in late June, which has already backed four companies with roughly sixteen more grants planned over the next year.

Financing Assets Matters as Much as Tokenizing Them

Gaurav was direct about a distinction he sees the industry underweighting: owning a tokenized asset and being able to finance it are two very different things. An institution holding tokenized treasuries can either sell a portion to raise cash, triggering a taxable event and changing its balance sheet, or borrow against the position and keep earning yield while accessing liquidity. Without financing infrastructure, he argued, trillions of dollars in tokenized assets on chain would sit largely idle.

Where AI Fits In

Gaurav sees AI increasingly stepping into roles blockchains have traditionally reserved for human or rule based observers, verifying and reconciling information at a scale neither pure automation nor human oversight could manage alone. He expects AI agents to take on more significant roles within blockchain systems over the next few years, working alongside the settlement guarantees blockchain already provides.

Looking Ahead

Gaurav’s five year vision for Palladium is one of invisibility: a company whose infrastructure underlies major on chain financial activity without users ever needing to know Palladium is there. On regulation, he was unambiguous, calling clarity an accelerant rather than a blocker for institutional adoption, while still crediting traditional banks with doing one thing better than crypto currently manages: protecting new, less tech savvy users from losing their funds.

Watch the full conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COdJCCPvib4 

In this episode of The Blockopedia podcast, Atomiq Labs co founder and CEO Sylvie sat down with The Blockopedia’s co founder Mohammad Ahmad Khan to talk about leaving banking for crypto, building trustless infrastructure between Bitcoin and other chains, and what it actually takes to earn user trust in a space still fighting its reputation.

Sylvie’s entry into crypto did not follow the usual founder script. Before Atomiq Labs, she worked in banking, management consulting and fintech, often as the right hand to CEOs. That experience, she says, gave her a firsthand view of how complicated traditional finance really is, which made the pitch for decentralized systems land differently when it finally reached her.

She bought her first Bitcoin in 2018 while working at a startup in Southern California, largely nudged by engineer friends who were convinced early. The real turning point came almost five years ago, when she met her future co-founder Adam through a program built to connect potential founders. Adam introduced her to the Bitcoin Lightning Network, and having seen the friction of legacy banking up close, she had what she describes as a small revelation about what the future of finance could look like.

What Atomiq Labs Actually Does

Atomiq Labs builds fully trustless swaps between Bitcoin and other chains, currently live on Solana, Starknet, Botanix and Citrea. Unlike typical bridges that rely on third party validators or multisig setups, Atomiq’s security comes directly from Bitcoin itself. Sylvie explained the logic simply: attacking the Bitcoin network would require billions of dollars in mining infrastructure, making it economically irrational to try. That built in security, rather than borrowed trust from a validator set, is the core of the product.

From Hackathon to Mainnet in Six Months

One milestone Sylvie is genuinely proud of is how quickly Atomiq Labs moved from idea to mainnet. The project started at a Solana hackathon in Berlin, where she and Adam decided almost spontaneously to build together. They won first place for Germany, earned an honorable mention globally, secured a grant from the Solana Foundation, and were live on mainnet within roughly six months, going live around August or September 2023.

Building Trust as an Early Stage Project

For a project handling cross chain value transfer, trust is everything. Sylvie pointed to two pillars that matter most for Atomiq Labs: fully open source code and independent audits. Early visibility from the hackathon win also helped, along with in person demos at Solana events, which she says build a kind of trust that online interaction simply cannot replicate.

User feedback has directly shaped the product too. An early Telegram channel gave the team direct input that led to real interface changes, something she credits for the compliment Atomiq recently received during a Starknet collaboration, where users called the redesigned front end simple enough for non technical crypto users to navigate.

Where the Market Still Falls Short

Sylvie is candid about crypto’s reputation problem. Mention working in crypto to someone outside the industry, she says, and the reaction is still often skepticism, largely because scams, rug pulls and meme coins dominate public perception over legitimate use cases like remittances and stablecoin adoption. She believes the industry needs to break out of its own echo chamber to reach a wider audience.

On real world assets, she is measured rather than hyped. While she sees genuine long term potential, she thinks institutional adoption of tokenized assets like treasury bills is still further away than the current enthusiasm suggests, even as she argues the underlying rails need to be built now regardless.

Advice for Founders

Asked what has helped her most as a founder, Sylvie pointed to her complementary partnership with her technical co-founder Adam. Her advice to future founders was direct: choose a co-founder you will genuinely enjoy working with, since you will likely spend more time with them than almost anyone else in your life. She also recommends a structured co founder questionnaire to surface shared values and working styles before committing.

In a quick round of rapid fire questions, Sylvie named Apple Notes as her essential tool, Telegram as where she finds the best conversations, and bear markets as better for builders than bull markets.

Watch the full conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQXobyM-4zg

In this episode of The Blockopedia podcast, Pyra’s Co-founder and CEO Diogo sat down with The Blockopedia’s Co-founder Mohammad Ahmad Khan to talk about building a fintech app that lets users invest their entire paycheck into crypto and other assets, spend through credit instead of selling, and recover stronger after a major public setback with the Drift exploit.

Diogo’s path into crypto started early. He first heard about Bitcoin and Ethereum in high school through a friend, and instead of just trading, he went straight to reading white papers. That curiosity carried him through a computer science degree, where he experimented with DeFi spending tools, yield strategies and arbitrage trading before eventually landing in the Solana ecosystem, where he has built ever since.

His first real product was a simple DeFi comparison tool that tracked arbitrage opportunities between decentralized and centralized exchanges. It never took off, but he calls it a valuable first lesson in shipping something real and getting feedback.

What Pyra Actually Does

Diogo explained Pyra in plain terms: it is an investment app that lets people build wealth with money they would normally just spend. Traditionally, people invest whatever is left over after covering expenses, which for most people is very little given the cost of living. Pyra flips that. Users invest their paycheck immediately, then draw a line of credit against their portfolio to cover rent, groceries and bills, so the invested capital keeps growing instead of sitting untouched or never existing at all.

He described this as the same strategy wealthy individuals already use, often called buy, borrow, die. Instead of selling assets and triggering capital gains tax, they borrow against their holdings while staying fully invested. Pyra is built to make that same mechanism safe and accessible for everyday users, not just the ultra wealthy with financial advisors managing it manually.

Why Solana

Diogo chose Solana early because it offered speed and low costs at a time when other scaling solutions were still new. That advantage has only compounded, he said, thanks to a large existing DeFi ecosystem and the growing wave of tokenized stocks, bonds and commodities landing on chain. Going multi chain has simply never felt necessary.

A Conversation From the Co Working Floor

The interview itself took place in person at a co working space in Dublin, where Diogo’s team was based for Build Station, an event bringing Solana builders together ahead of the next Colosseum hackathon. His co-founder Errol was on site as well, working alongside him in a space shared with several other Solana ecosystem teams. The setting gave the conversation an unusually grounded, on the ground feel, less a polished studio interview and more a real look at a founding team mid build.

Colosseum, Setbacks and Trying Again

Pyra’s team competed in Solana hackathons twice, first with limited success under an earlier event before Colosseum existed, then again a year later with a far stronger product, which earned them fifth place. Diogo credits persistence as much as skill, pointing to other founders in the ecosystem who applied to Colosseum multiple times before eventually winning grand prizes.

Facing the Drift Exploit

Diogo did not shy away from discussing Pyra’s most public challenge, the Drift exploit. Rather than framing it as the end of the story, he described it as motivation to rebuild with stronger safeguards. Pyra is self custodial and currently integrates with Kamino for lending, but the longer term plan involves diversifying across multiple lending protocols, exploring portfolio insurance, and eventually bringing credit infrastructure in house to reduce reliance on third party risk entirely.

What’s Next

Pyra is expanding beyond crypto assets into stocks, bonds and commodities, aiming to make the platform approachable for everyday users who may be wary of DeFi terminology but understand something like an S&P index or Apple stock. Bank deposits and withdrawals are also coming, along with a risk engine designed to help users avoid liquidation during market downturns so their portfolios can compound over years rather than months.

Funding so far has come from a mix of a small pre seed round, personal funds, friends and family, and hackathon prize money. Diogo says the next step is raising a proper round from investors who believe in the long term vision.

Community and Trust

Asked how he manages community trust, especially after a public setback, Diogo pointed to transparency as the core principle: being open about what the team is building, and staying available to answer questions rather than going quiet.

In a round of rapid fire questions, Diogo named Solana as where he is most bullish right now, said he uses Telegram for business conversations and is expanding into Instagram and TikTok, and shared that his advice to any founder facing a setback is simple: communicate openly, because people are listening even when it does not feel that way.

Watch the full conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uze-3Yigp74&t=50s