Stablecoins can move money around the world in seconds. Yet for most businesses, paying a supplier or contractor in another country is still slow, costly and hard to explain to an accountant. According to one founder, the problem is not the technology. It is the missing layer between blockchains and the way ordinary businesses work.

On the sidelines of Token2049 in Singapore, Mohammad Ahmad Khan, co-founder of The Blockopedia, sat down with Lola Oyelayo-Pearson, Founder and CEO of Anyflo, for the TBP Podcast. Lola spent nearly four years at Mysten Labs, the original contributor to the Sui blockchain, after roles at Shopify and Capital One. Over 18 minutes, they covered the three problems Anyflo wants to solve, where it stands today, why Anyflo uses Sui but stays multi-chain, security, and why so few women reach the core of the industry.

Key Takeaways

• Anyflo is building payment rails that let everyday businesses move money across borders on stablecoin rails, with fiat in and fiat out if they want it.
• Lola names three problems: slow and costly cross-border money, fiat-to-fiat transfers through a “stablecoin sandwich”, and receipts that accountants and regulators can follow.
• Anyflo is not fully live. It is testing with design partners in payroll, retail and travel, and banking, and hopes to secure an EU payments licence in the new year.
• Her main lesson for crypto builders: “token go up is not a business model”. Teams that do not understand fiat rails have high potential but limited reach.
• Anyflo leans on Sui for zero-gas stablecoin transfers but stays multi-chain. In her words, it locks customers into an outcome, not a blockchain.
• She says no founder can promise never to be hacked. Anyflo is audited and keeps each customer’s funds separate.

From an agency to Mysten Labs: the road to Anyflo

Lola says she has always been described as entrepreneurial. In every job, her approach was to work out the problem, then build what was needed to solve it. Before Shopify, she was at Capital One. Before that, she worked at another blockchain startup, and earlier she ran an agency that was later sold to Cognizant. According to Anyflo’s website, she led teams at Shopify Money and Capital One UK, and was GM of Commerce and Consumer Product at Mysten Labs.

The idea grew out of her time at Mysten Labs working on Sui. She met many companies that wanted to use stablecoins, but no supply chain existed to service them. “It’s one thing to have the L1 and the infrastructure,” she says. To make it real, it has to be plugged into everyday businesses.

She calls Anyflo the company she wishes she could have introduced to firms from her past roles, naming Red Bull, Adidas and Lyft (they are not Anyflo customers). This year, she says, she took the chance: “we are building the payment rails to bring stablecoins to everyday businesses.”

The three problems Anyflo solves for businesses

Individuals who use stablecoins, Lola says, are usually comfortable with a self-custody wallet, an exchange or a decentralised exchange (DEX). Businesses are different. “When you are a business, you have hundreds of interfaces,” she says. To move money between many customers, suppliers and partners, “self-custody doesn’t work. Exchanges don’t work.”

Businesses must also meet rules on sanctions and money laundering and know where money is going. So “even the idea of using a decentralised exchange is incredibly scary”, she says, before anyone mentions hacks.

What businesses need, she argues, is a supply chain that understands how they operate. Anyflo’s pitch is to be that layer, aimed at three problems:

1. Cross-border money. Doing it in fiat is expensive and slow. Anyflo lets businesses do it on stablecoin rails.

2. Fiat in, fiat out. Some businesses want stablecoin speed but do not want to hold stablecoins. Anyflo supports a “stablecoin sandwich”: the payment starts in fiat, crosses on stablecoin rails and ends in fiat.

3. Records an accountant can understand. Instead of links to a block explorer, the business gets a receipt showing who sent what to whom and the route the money took, which auditors or regulators can also check.

“Those three things, they sound really easy, they’re very, very hard if you’re a business today,” Lola says. Few firms can offer this to a global audience, she adds, “not just US via Stripe and Bridge”.

Where Anyflo stands today

Ahmad asks what changes early partners have seen. Lola is direct: no partners are transacting fully yet. Anyflo has customer design partners who represent the needs it is designing for, in three areas:

• payroll
• retail and travel
• a modern banking-type solution

“Our model is an orchestrator,” she says. Each transaction generates an intent, Anyflo puts it out for bids, and a solver with a quote completes it. Testing with design partners and liquidity providers runs over the next three to four months.

In parallel, Anyflo is building its compliance posture and hopes to have an EU payments licence in the new year. She then expects a full launch, starting with payments between Europe and the African continent, then Asia.

The public record lines up. According to Anyflo’s press release on PR Newswire, the company emerged from stealth on 8 October 2026 at Sui Basecamp during Token2049 Singapore, after being incubated within Mysten Labs. It entered private alpha in October, with a beta planned for the first quarter of 2027. Pulse 2.0 reported that Mysten Labs invested $1 million and that Anyflo acqui-hired Native, a Bitcoin lending project on Sui that finished in the top five of 630 projects at Sui Overflow 2025.

“Token go up is not a business model”

Asked what her experience taught her, Lola makes a joke she says she means in good faith: “token go up is not a business model.” She calls it her biggest insight.

Very few people know how payments work, she says, pointing to India’s UPI as “a very, very sophisticated solution to a chronic problem” built on deep infrastructure. Her edge is that she understands that infrastructure. “When you understand how fiat rails work, and then you think about how do I connect fiat and stablecoin rails, you actually have a magic insight that very few people understand.”

Many blockchain teams have great cryptographers and developers, she says, but “unfortunately for them, they don’t know how fiat rails work”, or how to build a business model. “And so they have high potential, but limited reach.”

She does not overclaim. The proof, she says, will come when Anyflo starts scaling transactions. “We’re not naive about how difficult it’s going to be,” she adds. Compliance and regulation are areas Anyflo will not compromise on.

What changes for a business that uses Anyflo

Today, Lola says, a business offering cross-border payments is usually in one of two places. Either the service is expensive and “your customer feels like they have no choice”, or it is cheap and the business makes little profit for the effort.

The first change is a stablecoin sandwich that removes correspondent banking, settlement delays and other costs. At a baseline, she says, the business could raise its profitability and lower the cost to its users.

The second change is choice. Her example is payroll. Contractors hired overseas may have banking problems and would rather receive a stablecoin than local currency, which is hard for payroll companies to deliver.

“Give your customers a choice,” she says. With Anyflo, a business that offers rupees or dollars today could also offer stablecoin dollars, or stablecoin rupees if they exist in future, with the same effort. “We just make it a simple extra option for the business,” she says, and it gains either margin or customer value.

Will Anyflo get into cards?

Lola says many vendors on blockchain rails already specialise in stablecoin-backed card issuance, and Anyflo can tap that network. It will look at supporting “receive and spend”: an instant wallet, or a virtual bank account and an instant card.

The roadmap will follow customer demand. “We’re a small team, we’re agentically powered,” she says. Not every feature will exist on day one, but if a customer brings demand for cards, Anyflo will make it available.

Why Sui, and why Anyflo stays multi-chain

Given her Mysten Labs background, Ahmad asks what role Sui plays. Lola says Anyflo, as an independent orchestrator, can use any blockchain rails and has no fixed requirement to use Sui.

The practical case for Sui is cost. “The number one thing that Sui’s offering today that no other chain can match is zero gas on stablecoin transfers,” she says. “Taking gas out means that demand does not become a penalty on the business.” According to a Sui press release on PR Newswire, the network launched protocol-level gasless stablecoin transfers on 20 May 2026, taking fees for supported stablecoin transfers to zero. She also points to Sui’s native privacy features, which let Anyflo add services without extra vendors or cost.

If a customer needs a specific chain or asset, Anyflo will deliver it. If it only wants cheap, fast and reliable, she says Sui may be the right route nine times out of ten. “That’s the beauty of orchestrating,” she says. “I don’t lock you into one blockchain. I lock you into an outcome.”

Security: why no founder can promise never to be hacked

“I think it would be incredibly naive for any tech founder to say we will never be hacked,” Lola says. She adds that agentically powered development creates new risks as well as new benefits. She sets out what Anyflo does:

• “We’re fully audited for our alpha right now,” she says, and audits will continue.
• Engineering is led by Robert Zaremba, whom she describes as co-founder and CTO of Native, a Bitcoin collateralisation platform, and a developer who has worked with secure protocols on Near, Sui and EVM chains.
• Anyflo builds security first, with regular testing and review on top.
• Unlike an exchange, one customer’s money will not be mixed with other customers’ money or with Anyflo’s own.

That isolation keeps the damage surface very limited if something goes wrong, she says. Anyflo’s website FAQ adds that it is non-custodial, with funds held by regulated custody and banking partners in segregated accounts.

“You make best efforts, you follow best practices, and then you hope for the best. And then if something goes wrong, you react really well,” she says.

Why so few women reach the core of the industry

Ahmad’s last question is why so few women reach the core of the industry. Lola says she cannot give a reason. She can speak to her own career: leaders who invested in her, and “powerhouse women” she reported to who showed her what it is like to be a CEO.

That built her confidence. “I’m not doing this as a female, but I happen to be a female. I happen to be a mother. I happen to be a wife,” she says. “It’s not about having it all. It’s about just doing the thing that you’re most passionate about.”

She suggests society sometimes gives men more freedom to focus on their passion. With a rich network and strong female role models, starting with her mother, the only questions for her were the right idea, experience and plan. She believes those have come together with Anyflo. “So, we’re just getting on with the job.”

Final thoughts

The interview makes a practical case. Lola is not saying businesses should want stablecoins for their own sake. She is saying stablecoin rails only help if they come with what businesses already rely on: compliance, clear receipts and fiat at both ends.

Much of this is still a plan. Anyflo is in private alpha, no partners are transacting fully, and the EU licence and full launch are targets. Her points on cost savings and Sui’s lead are her own views. The real test, as she says, will come when Anyflo starts scaling transactions.

Watch the full conversation on the TBP Podcast YouTube channel.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is Anyflo?

Anyflo is a stablecoin payments orchestration company led by founder and CEO Lola Oyelayo-Pearson. It offers businesses one API to send and receive cross-border payments in their preferred currency, settled on stablecoin rails. It was incubated within Mysten Labs and emerged from stealth in October 2026.

Q: What is a stablecoin sandwich?

A cross-border payment that starts in fiat, crosses the border as a stablecoin and ends in fiat, so neither side has to hold stablecoins.

Q: Is Anyflo live?

Not fully. Lola says Anyflo is testing with design partners and liquidity providers and hopes to secure an EU payments licence in the new year. Its press release says it entered private alpha in October 2026, with a beta planned for the first quarter of 2027.

Q: Does Anyflo only work on Sui?

No. Lola says Anyflo is a multi-chain orchestrator with no fixed requirement to use Sui. Sui’s zero-gas stablecoin transfers make it a frequent choice, but Anyflo will use other chains when a customer needs them.

Q: How does Anyflo approach security?

Lola says the alpha is fully audited and each customer’s funds are kept apart from other customers’ and from Anyflo’s own money. She says no founder can promise never to be hacked.

Q: Which payment corridors will Anyflo serve first?

Lola says Anyflo plans to start with Europe and the African continent, then expand to Asia. This is a company plan, not a launched service. This article is not financial advice; stablecoins carry risks, so check licensing and terms before moving money.

Think about the last time you watched a big match, a concert or a DJ set on your phone. You probably scrolled through the comments and watched the stream. But did it feel like you were in the room with other people? For Christophe Dhaisne, Head of Product at Vibrez, the honest answer for most people is no. That gap, he argues, is what a new kind of social network should close.

In Singapore during Token2049 week, which ran straight into the Formula 1 Singapore Grand Prix weekend, Amreen of The Blockopedia sat down with Christophe for the TBP Podcast at a Formula 1 event with big screens set up to watch the race. Introduced on camera simply as Chris, he used the short conversation to correct a common assumption about the company, explain what a “moment” means on Vibrez and walk through what the team built in eight weeks as an AI-native company. He also described a 20-supercar road trip from London to Ibiza, and set out what comes next: a map that invites people to discover moments, and profiles built around passions.

Key Takeaways

• Vibrez is not an events or retreat company. Christophe describes it as “a new kind of social network” and a super app built around shared passions.
• The core idea is the “moment”. People who share a passion connect around a live experience, relive it later and reconnect with everyone who took part once it ends.
• The team built its current app in eight weeks. Christophe calls it a proof of concept and credits the fast progress to Vibrez being AI native.
• The app already covers the basics of Instagram-style posting and Twitch-style live streaming, including profiles, follows, photo and video posts and live streams.
• A road trip of 20 supercars from London to Ibiza was run as a moment on Vibrez. The company’s FAQ dates it to 30 September to 5 October 2026.
• The next big job is navigation. Christophe wants to turn a mostly static map into one that invites users to discover moments, and to build profiles around passions.

Not an events company: what Vibrez says it is

Amreen opened by describing Vibrez as a company that organises and hosts events. It was an easy assumption, given that the interview took place at a Formula 1 event in Singapore.

Christophe began his answer with “a small correction”. Organising events and retreats, he said, is “not what Vibrez is all about.”

“Vibrez is a new kind of social network. And Vibrez is what you could call a super app,” he says.

In Christophe’s telling, real-world experiences such as a race weekend or a road trip are not the product itself. They happen inside the app, where people can watch, take part and stay connected afterwards. The company’s website frames this as one universe with three gates: nightlife, sports and events.

The problem: watching alone on a phone

Rather than describe the product straight away, Christophe turned the question back on the host. He asked her to think of the last time she watched a big game, a movie, a concert or a DJ set on her phone, and whether it felt like she was with other people in the room.

Amreen recalled watching a concert in Dubai during Global Village. When pressed, she said she was “just watching it.”

That was his point. When people watch something on a phone, he said, they scroll through comments and watch the video, “but you’re not participating with other people, right? You’re not engaging with other people.”

Christophe says this is the problem at the core of what Vibrez is solving. In his view, today’s platforms show content to large audiences but do not make a viewer feel part of a group sharing the same experience, or keep that group together once the event is over.

What is a “moment” on Vibrez?

The answer Vibrez offers is built around one word: moments.

“Vibrez is a place where people who share the same passion can get connected, can engage through moments,” Christophe says. He then describes three stages. First, you live the moment. Then you can relive it. Finally, “you can make it last.”

The third stage is the one he stresses most. “Once the moment is over, you can reconnect with all the people you shared this moment with,” he says.

A moment can take many forms. Christophe says a content creator “can create different types of moments, a party, a road trip if you want to, anything,” and use those moments to engage a community. The app’s App Store listing describes the same idea in product terms. Users can create Live Streams, Parties and Roadtrips inside buildings on the Vibrez map, and join live video, audio, chat and reactions.

He is confident about how new this is. “As a social platform, there is no equivalent to what we’re actually building today,” he says. That is the company’s own view.

What was built in eight weeks

Amreen asked Christophe to walk her through the app as if she had just downloaded it. Where does a new user land, and what makes the room come alive?

His first answer was a reality check. In his book, what the team has built in eight weeks is not yet even a beta or an alpha version. “It’s pretty much a proof of concept,” he says.

What makes the speed possible, he says, is the way the company works. “Since we’re AI native, the development is going extremely fast.”

In those eight weeks, Christophe says the team has put in place core features that users would recognise from Instagram and Twitch:

• creating a profile
• following and unfollowing people
• posting all types of content, including video and pictures
• live streaming, which he compares to “what you would do on Twitch”

He sums it up as having built “the core functionality of a social network like Instagram, which is pretty impressive.”

The company’s public pages reflect that pace. The Vibrez FAQ says the team ships “faster than the stores can review,” with most updates reaching users over the air while the app is running. The App Store listing also describes a feed called Pulse for text, photo and video posts, direct messages and community games.

London to Ibiza: a supercar road trip as a moment

To show what a moment looks like in practice, Christophe pointed to an event the team had organised the week before the interview.

“20 supercars left London all the way to Ibiza with different stops all the way through,” he says. “And this road trip is actually a moment on Vibrez.”

The Vibrez FAQ confirms the dates. Roadtrip 2026 ran from London to Ibiza from 30 September to 5 October, and users can relive it in the app. The FAQ adds that the Roadtrip feature can ask for a user’s location to guide them to the next checkpoint, and that this is optional.

A road trip is a clear first example of the idea: a start, a finish, stops along the way and a group of people who share one interest, in this case supercars.

Who is behind Vibrez?

According to its website, Vibrez is run by Vibrez Universe Pte. Ltd., a company registered in Singapore. Its privacy policy lists an office at Millenia Tower in Singapore and says the service is only for adults aged 18 and over.

Vibrez is a portfolio company of La Royale Group, a privately held investment group headquartered in Singapore and led by Group CEO Madelynn Loo. In a press release carried by Markets Insider, La Royale described Vibrez as a Singapore-based startup “developing a digital entertainment platform connecting music, sports and fan communities,” and said the app was in beta.

In a LinkedIn post, La Royale Group also said Vibrez used race week in Singapore to introduce the app to real users and gather feedback ahead of its beta launch. That fits Christophe’s description of a product still at the proof-of-concept stage.

The timing also explains the setting of this interview. Token2049 Singapore took place at Marina Bay Sands on 7 and 8 October 2026, with 25,000 attendees from 160 countries set to attend, according to a TOKEN2049 press release. The Formula 1 Singapore Grand Prix followed on the weekend of 9 to 11 October. Vibrez is not presented as a crypto project, and Christophe did not mention tokens or blockchain at any point in the conversation.

The hard part: rethinking navigation and the map

Amreen asked what the next city or moment for Vibrez would be. Christophe answered by describing the product work ahead.

Development is moving fast, he said, and the team is “adding functionalities on the go.” He admitted there is still a gap to close with the posting features people know from Instagram. “But that’s easy to do, without being cocky,” he says.

The bigger challenge, in his view, lies elsewhere. “I think the challenge today is really to rethink the navigation, how people navigate through this virtual world,” he says.

Vibrez presents its universe as a map. On the App Store, the company describes browsing districts and buildings to discover communities and join what is happening inside them. Christophe says that map is “pretty much static” today.

The goal is to change that. “We want the map to really invite you to discover moments through the different people and the artists and all the content creators which you will follow on Vibrez,” he says. He accepts the team still has “a bit of work to do” on this side.

Profiles built around passions

The second area of change is the profile.

Until recently, Christophe says, the Vibrez profile was mostly a way to write a small bio. The team has now added a new function. “Today you can already share your passions and indicate what passions you’re into through your profile and find people who share the same passions as you on the app,” he says.

That links back to the company’s tagline, “Share the Passion”, and to its core idea that people should connect through shared interests rather than a general feed. Recent App Store release notes describe the same update, inviting users to “tell us your passions and meet members who share them,” alongside a longer 500-character bio.

What comes next for Vibrez

Christophe closed with a simple message. “This is just the beginning. Stay tuned because the app is going to evolve very rapidly in the coming days and weeks.”

The company’s own pages give some clues about what is on the way. The Vibrez homepage says the Nightlife and Sports gates are open, while the Events gate, covering concerts, festivals and the pit, opens next. Its Moments page lists upcoming moments for Singapore, the Road to Ibiza, Ibiza and a Solomun Closing 2026 event, all marked “coming soon”.

Final thoughts

The interview is short, but it makes one argument clearly. Christophe believes that watching on a phone has become a solitary habit, and that a social network built around shared moments can turn it back into a group experience that lasts after the event ends. The supercar road trip from London to Ibiza is the first public example of that idea in action.

It is worth separating what exists from what is planned. Profiles, follows, photo and video posts, live streaming and passion tags are features Christophe says are live today. A map that actively invites users into moments, and an Events gate for concerts and festivals, are still on the roadmap. His claim that no equivalent platform exists is the company’s own view, and the app remains, by his own description, a proof of concept built in eight weeks.

Watch the full conversation on the TBP Podcast YouTube channel.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is Vibrez?

Vibrez is a social app from Singapore-registered Vibrez Universe Pte. Ltd. Its Head of Product, Christophe Dhaisne, describes it as “a new kind of social network” and a super app where people who share a passion connect through live moments, relive them and reconnect afterwards. The app is for users aged 18 and over.

Q: What is a “moment” on Vibrez?

A moment is a shared experience inside the app, such as a party, a live stream or a road trip. Creators use moments to engage their community. Once a moment ends, people can reconnect with the others who took part in it.

Q: How long did it take to build the Vibrez app?

Christophe says the team built the current version in eight weeks. He calls it a proof of concept and says the fast progress comes from Vibrez being an AI-native company.

Q: What features does Vibrez have today?

According to Christophe, users can create a profile, follow people, post photos and videos, live stream and list their passions to find like-minded people. The App Store listing also mentions direct messages and a map of districts and buildings.

Q: What was the Vibrez London to Ibiza road trip?

It was a road trip of 20 supercars from London to Ibiza with stops along the way, run as a moment on Vibrez. The company’s FAQ says Roadtrip 2026 ran from 30 September to 5 October 2026.

Q: Is Vibrez a crypto or blockchain project?

Nothing in the interview or on the company pages we reviewed describes Vibrez as a crypto or blockchain project. The conversation was recorded in Singapore during Token2049 week, but it focused only on Vibrez as a social and entertainment app.

For more than a decade, crypto exchanges have competed on the screen. Faster apps, cleaner charts, fewer taps to place a trade. According to one of OKX’s longest-serving executives, that contest is about to change. The next big user of a crypto exchange may not be a person at all – it may be a fleet of AI agents acting on that person’s behalf.

On the sidelines of Token2049 in Singapore, Mohammad Ahmad Khan, co-founder of The Blockopedia, sat down with Lennix Lai of OKX for the TBP Podcast. Lennix joined OKX in 2017 after a career in traditional finance. Over 18 minutes, the conversation covered why he left Wall Street for a young exchange, why AI agents in crypto trading are now an infrastructure priority, how exchanges are turning into financial super apps, and why so many crypto exchanges did not survive the last bear market.

Key Takeaways

• OKX believes AI will become the next trading interface. Users may stop clicking through apps and instead direct agents that trade, pay and manage wealth for them.
• Being “agent ready” means more than an API. It needs secure servers, permission rules for what an agent can and cannot do, updated compliance standards and the capacity to handle agent-scale traffic.
• Lennix does not call OKX an operating system for crypto. He calls it an “agentic layer” that lets ordinary users talk to financial products in plain language.
• Within five years, he expects crypto exchanges to become financial super apps that hold equities, forex, commodities, rates products and crypto in one margin account, trading 24/7.
• Exchanges that depended only on crypto trading volume were wiped out in bear markets. Survivors widened into traditional finance products, banking partnerships and audits.
• His advice to newcomers to this cycle: the stories are stablecoins and real-world assets (RWA), so study the companies building them, not only the tokens.

From Wall Street to a young crypto exchange

Lennix joined OKX in 2017, more than eight years ago. At about the same time, he read the Bitcoin white paper for the first time. He admits that before that, he thought Bitcoin was a scam. The paper changed his mind. It is only a few pages long, and he was struck by how simple the mathematics behind it was.

He came from a traditional banking and trading background, with past roles at JP Morgan and AIG. Those firms were sophisticated and ran huge operations. OKX, by contrast, was very young. His first job there was to bring traditional financial products into crypto.

The reason was volatility. Bitcoin’s annualised volatility at the time ran above 100%. Lai’s view was that more financial instruments and derivative products would help smooth the market, improve liquidity and give traders better tools for managing risk.

Why you cannot copy traditional finance one-to-one

The early plan was to take what worked in traditional markets – funds, ETFs, index products – and rebuild them for crypto. It did not work. Crypto, Lennix says, is a very different market, and you cannot replicate traditional finance 100% in one go.

His example is collateral. Eight years ago, USDT was not yet the default stablecoin for trading. If you wanted to trade a Bitcoin derivative, the only thing you could deposit was crypto itself, usually Bitcoin or Ethereum. That meant traders were buying Bitcoin derivatives with Bitcoin as margin. The profit-and-loss curve of such a position is not linear, so OKX had to make many adjustments in its back end.

The textbook concepts stayed the same. The details changed. Lennix calls those small adjustments innovation: tailoring proven instruments to the special conditions of the crypto market.

OKX in one line: the glue between two worlds

Asked to describe OKX in a single line, Lennix answers that it sits in the transaction between traditional finance and crypto finance. “We are the glue of these two worlds,” he says, describing OKX as a global fintech powerhouse.

That positioning has hard numbers behind it. In March 2026, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, took a stake in OKX at a $25 billion valuation and a seat on its board, with plans to give OKX’s roughly 120 million users access to ICE’s U.S. futures markets and tokenized NYSE-linked equities.

Why a crypto exchange cares about AI agents

This is the core of the interview, and the reason the episode is titled “Will AI Become Finance’s New Interface?”

Lennix says OKX believes AI is likely to become the next-generation trading interface – the way people interact with the whole financial ecosystem. Until now, fintech companies, banks, neobanks, crypto exchanges and wallets have spent huge effort on UI and UX. Every product was built to serve a human.

Once AI becomes powerful enough, and intelligence becomes scalable and cheap, that changes. People may no longer interact directly with an exchange’s products. Instead, they will use a fleet of agents, each acting like a specialist, that interact with the exchange for them.

So OKX is planning for a new kind of customer base. It serves tens of millions of human users today, but it may need to serve billions of agents tomorrow.

What “agent ready” means in practice

Lennix lists what an exchange must upgrade before agents can safely use it:

• API services and MCP servers – machine-friendly ways for agents to read data and place orders.
• A security layer – so an agent can sign approved transactions without ever touching a user’s private keys.
• Security policies and a permissions framework – clear rules on what an agent can and cannot do.
• Upgraded authority and compliance standards – built for agent activity, not only human accounts.
• Capacity for agent-scale traffic – the ability to handle billions of agent transactions.

These are not only ideas on a podcast. OKX has already shipped parts of this stack. Its open-source Agent Trade Kit lets AI assistants trade on OKX through the Model Context Protocol, with API keys kept locally and options such as a read-only mode and rate limits. In mid-2026, OKX also opened OKX AI, a marketplace where agents hire each other and settle payments in stablecoins, after a closed beta with 50 early AI service providers.

Is OKX building the operating system of crypto?

Ahmad asks whether OKX wants to become the “on-chain AI OS” – a base layer that apps and agents build on. Lennix pushes back on the label. It is hard to call it an operating system, he says. He prefers “agentic layer”, or an agent-ready layer that others build on.

He breaks an agent down into the parts a platform must support:

• the ability to work with a large language model
• a way to define the gateway and the boundaries of each agent
• a way to review, step by step, what an agent has and has not done
• a way to evaluate how effective your agents are
• a basic security layer, so agents can only sign authorised transactions without access to private keys

The goal, he says, is to let ordinary users talk to OKX’s products in plain language, with agents doing the work in between.

Crypto exchange vs brokerage: what changes in five years

Crypto exchanges now list stocks and ETFs. Will people still see a difference between a crypto exchange and a normal brokerage in five years? Lennix says yes – by principle, they will remain very different.

His prediction is that crypto exchanges will become financial super apps. One app would hold equities, forex, commodities, interest rate swaps, structured products and crypto. All of it would sit in one collateral and margin account, with one buying power and one equity balance. It would be regulated, and it would trade 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Brokerages may evolve and add products too. But Lennix argues an exchange like OKX already does more than a trading platform does. Beyond the brokerage-style front end, OKX is:

• a wallet operator
• a blockchain layer developer
• a card and payments provider for everyday spending

He sees the full journey – spending, wealth management with AI agents, trading, speculation, quantitative and high-frequency trading – living on one platform.

What Token2049 showed about the industry

Asked what people at Token2049 are underestimating, Lennix points to who was in the room. He saw many more payment firms, security tokenization firms and even cloud providers. In other words, a crypto conference full of traditional fintech players.

His reading is that crypto has become one part of a broader, holistic financial system. The industry is wider and bigger than before. People are realising the technology is neutral but useful to other asset classes too. The experience of running a crypto company also applies to running businesses in other financial instruments. The result, he says, is that everyone is starting to build a single financial app that holds every kind of instrument.

Why so many crypto exchanges were wiped out

Many exchanges have disappeared from the market. Lennix says the reason is obvious. If your business is purely a crypto exchange – spot and derivatives, trading only – your revenue depends on crypto volatility, mostly Bitcoin’s. When the crypto market has a bad time, that business model is very hard to sustain.

Two forces are now reshaping the field:

• Fintechs are moving in. Clearer regulation is the main reason. More governments now have clear definitions of crypto, rules on how it is regulated and licences firms can apply for. A stable payments company, wallet or bank can use that clarity to extend its products and audience into crypto.
• Big crypto players are moving out – into traditional finance. Larger exchanges like OKX now offer traditional products, work with banks, are audited by Big Four firms, and collaborate with institutions such as BlackRock. They also build their own wallets and settlement layers, such as X Layer.

The wider product range makes these firms much less sensitive to a crypto winter. Lennix expects many crypto-only firms to fall away, while new players expand into the crypto audience.

Advice for people entering crypto this cycle

Lennix says this cycle has fewer narratives than the last. Past cycles were driven by memecoins, DeFi, yield optimisation and similar themes. This one is mostly about stablecoins and real-world assets (RWA), and how RWA interacts with the rest of the market.

That shifts what matters. Underlying technology and scalability are still important, he says, but the focus now is the link between traditional finance and crypto. His advice: do not look only at Bitcoin. Put much more weight on the future of the crypto companies themselves, not only their tokens.

What’s next for OKX

On future plans, Lennix names three priorities:

• More traditional finance products – adding equities in different regions and more commodities on a tokenized platform.
• The ICE collaboration – which would give OKX the ability to offer true one-to-one tokenization of underlying shares, integrated into the OKX product suite. ICE and OKX expanded this in June 2026 through a joint venture for tokenized equities.
• AI across the roadmap – AI is now a central part of OKX’s product strategy. The aim is a next version of its AI products, so users can trade with AI easily and seamlessly.

Final thoughts

The interview makes one argument clearly: the exchange of the future is less a trading screen and more an infrastructure layer. If Lennix is right, the winners will be platforms that are safe for agents to use, broad enough to survive a crypto winter, and regulated enough to sit alongside traditional finance.

It is still a forecast. Agent-driven trading raises open questions on security, liability and regulation, and much of it is at an early stage. Anyone letting an AI agent act on their funds should start with read-only access, small limits and a clear view of the risks.

Watch the full conversation on the TBP Podcast YouTube channel.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What are AI agents in crypto trading?

AI agents are software programs, usually built on large language models, that act for a user. In crypto trading they can read market data, place orders, manage positions or make payments within limits the user sets. OKX expects users to direct fleets of such agents instead of using exchange apps directly.

Q: What does “agent ready” mean for a crypto exchange?

According to OKX’s Lennix Lai, it means offering APIs and MCP servers for agents, a security layer that lets agents sign approved transactions without touching private keys, permission rules, upgraded compliance standards and the capacity for very high agent traffic.

Q: Is OKX building an operating system for crypto?

Lennix does not use that term. He describes OKX as an “agentic layer” – infrastructure that lets developers build agents and lets ordinary users interact with OKX products in plain language.

Q: Will crypto exchanges replace brokerages?

Lennix says the two will remain different. He expects crypto exchanges to become financial super apps with equities, forex, commodities, rates products and crypto in one margin account, trading 24/7, plus wallets, payments and blockchain infrastructure.

Q: Why did so many crypto exchanges shut down?

Exchanges that relied only on crypto trading earned most of their revenue from crypto volatility. In bear markets that revenue collapses. Firms that broadened into traditional finance products, banking partnerships and audits became less exposed to crypto winters.

Q: What should new crypto investors focus on this cycle?

Lennix says this cycle centres on stablecoins and real-world assets. He advises newcomers to study the companies building in crypto, not only the tokens. This is an industry view, not investment advice – crypto assets are volatile and can lose value.

The Blockopedia caught up with Kevin Follonier, founder of When Shift Happens, in person at Bitcoin Asia 2026 in Hong Kong, just a day after Kevin sat down with CZ for an interview on the conference’s main stage. The Blockopedia’s Co-founder Mohammad Ahmad Khan sat with Kevin to talk about how a media company built almost entirely without conferences, networking or a marketing budget ended up landing Saylor, Brian Armstrong, and CZ.

Kevin’s path into crypto started with an exit. After building and selling a data analytics company in London between 2015 and 2018, he went looking for a depressed market to put his money into, and found one: crypto in late 2018. He went all-in on Bitcoin and ETH in early 2019, then lost nearly everything trading leverage on BitMEX during the March 2020 COVID crash. He rebuilt through the 2020 and 2021 bull run, only to lose 92 percent of it again, roughly seven or eight million dollars in two days, when Terra Luna collapsed. Somewhere in the wreckage of that cycle, sitting through the FTX fallout and a media landscape he found genuinely bad, the idea for When Shift Happens took shape: studio quality, long form interviews with the industry’s biggest founders, built to make crypto look serious rather than chaotic.

Ahmad opened by half joking that he felt a little intimidated sitting across from someone who had been with CZ just a day earlier. Kevin waved it off immediately, telling him not to worry, that he was just a normal guy, no different from anyone else in the room. It set the tone for the rest of the conversation, which stayed loose and direct rather than the usual polished exchange between two crypto media figures.

Meeting CZ Was the Payoff of Three and a Half Years of Compounding

Kevin was candid that Tuesday’s on stage conversation with CZ was his first time ever meeting him, and that it happened because CZ’s own team specifically requested Kevin as the interviewer for Bitcoin Asia. He traced that directly back to a two and a half hour interview with Michael Saylor recorded three months earlier, a conversation that reportedly drew interest from people connected to the Trump family wanting to appear on the podcast next. Sponsors including Bitwise, Jupiter, Athena, Kaito and Variational have all approached When Shift Happens directly, unprompted, something Kevin credits entirely to founders watching the podcast and immediately noticing how different it felt from a typical Zoom recorded crypto interview.

The Real Interview Already Happened, Off Stage

Kevin revealed something most of the room in Hong Kong didn’t know: he and CZ had already recorded a full studio podcast before the stage conversation even happened. In his view, that studio recording will end up mattering far more than the thirty minute stage appearance, simply because studio conversations allow for depth, intimacy and genuine connection that an on stage format never can. His prep process before any major interview runs into the double digits of hours, researching, talking to teams, and using AI tools to sharpen his questions down to the one or two that actually matter, all in service of avoiding what he called the industry’s most common failure mode: a shallow conversation about token price with someone who deserves better questions.

He Has Never Once Networked at a Conference

Perhaps Kevin’s most pointed claim was this: in over three years of building the podcast, he has never attended a side event and rarely sets foot in a main conference hall. His logic borrows directly from Naval Ravikant, that a genuinely good product pulls people toward it rather than requiring its creator to chase connections. For Kevin, the podcast itself functions as marketing, personal branding, business development and networking simultaneously, and a well produced episode reaches far more people than any stage panel ever could. He pointed to his Saylor interview’s 1.7 million views as proof that studio work outperforms conference visibility by an order of magnitude.

Ahmad pushed back gently here, noting that he himself had built a chunk of his own network through conferences and speaker slots, and asked whether that approach was simply wrong. Kevin didn’t dismiss it outright, but held his ground, saying the podcast format let him skip that entire game because the product did the networking for him instead.

Consistency Is the Entire Moat

Asked what separates him from the wave of founders and creators who start podcasts and quietly abandon them within weeks, Kevin’s answer was blunt: almost nobody actually sticks with it. He estimated that posting more than three episodes puts a creator in the top 10 percent of people who attempt podcasting, and posting more than twenty one puts them in the top 1 percent, a bar he considers absurdly low given how much opportunity sits on the other side of it. His advice to anyone starting out was to try many things without waiting for permission or trends to validate the choice, and to pay attention to which pursuit still feels compelling at inconvenient hours, alone, with no audience watching yet.

What’s Next

Kevin said he has deliberately turned down opportunities to expand into adjacent business lines, choosing instead to keep doubling down on the podcast itself rather than diluting focus. Being in the room with major founders early, he noted, has already paid off in ways beyond media, citing early conviction in Zcash and participating in Hyperliquid’s token generation event as direct results of relationships built through the show.

Ahmad closed by telling Kevin he hoped to sit down with him again for a longer conversation somewhere down the line, a sentiment Kevin returned warmly before the two wrapped up on the sidelines of the conference floor.

 

Watch the full conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T44G1biLUE0 

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