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

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