Exponential: A Nexus Podcast

A conversation with Maggie Love, the founder of SheFi, about six years of building one of crypto's largest education communities.The idea for SheFi arrived on a run in 2019. Love had been at ConsenSys long enough to live through the 2018 bear market, and as the first DeFi teams began to form she noticed two things at once: people were earning twenty percent on their tokens through MakerDAO and Compound, and none of the people building or talking about it on stage at ETHDenver looked like her. Find more details about this episode on the Nexus blog.

Hank Korth has watched a lot of distributed systems cycles come and go. A professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Lehigh University — with an appointment in the business college and as the lead at Lehigh Blockchain — he has been thinking about networked systems since the late 1980s, when his database research examined how independently administered systems could transact across a network. On this episode of Exponential, he joined the show to talk about where his students and research team are concentrating their attention now: zero-knowledge acceleration, onchain privacy that can coexist with regulation, and the agentic era beginning to take shape beneath the headlines.

Mrudul Gole, Head of Business Development at NodeOps, joined Exponential to trace the arc of a company that started as a blockchain validator and is now building the infrastructure layer for the AI era. The conversation covered the evolution of decentralized compute, the unlikely synergies between blockchain and AI, and a bold prediction about what dev teams will look like in six months.

The most important milestone in crypto, argues Nic Roberts-Huntley, will be the one that goes completely unnoticed. In this episode of Exponential, the founder and CEO of Blueprint Finance sits down to discuss how his firm is building the infrastructure for institutional-grade DeFi yield — and why the endgame is a world where the underlying mechanics of onchain finance quietly power everything from savings accounts to credit card rewards without anyone realizing it.Blueprint Finance operates two protocols — Concrete and Glow — and positions itself as a counterweight to the degenerate, high-leverage yield strategies that proliferated during the last bull run. "We're kind of trying to be the next wave of institutional-grade yield with onchain finance," Roberts-Huntley explains. Read more on the Nexus blog.

Nexus founder and CEO Daniel Marin appeared on the Exponential podcast this week to address the company's decision to pull back from its March 17th milestone campaign and to lay out his views on AI, agentic finance, and what he sees as the defining infrastructure opportunity of the decade.The conversation covered ground ranging from how AI is reshaping startup competition to why Daniel believes blockchain infrastructure needs to be designed for autonomous agents — not just human users.

In this episode of Exponential, Laszlo Szabo, co-founder and CEO of Kiln, joins to talk about one of the most important developments quietly happening in crypto today: the evolution of yield in digital assets. As Laszlo explains, yield is becoming the bridge between traditional finance and the onchain economy, opening the door to new financial products and new participants.Kiln operates what Laszlo describes as an "onchain yield platform," providing the infrastructure that exchanges, custodians, wallets, and asset managers use to offer staking and other yield strategies to their users. "We provide them the technology, we provide them the infrastructure so that they can offer digital asset yields to their customers," he explains. What began with staking has expanded into lending, stablecoin strategies, and more advanced onchain asset management.

In this episode of Exponential, Jin Kwon, co-founder of saga.xyz, explains how blockchain infrastructure will disappear into the background.Saga began as what Jin calls “a chain to launch chains.” The original thesis was simple: make block space more accessible for builders. But while the early bottleneck in crypto was scarce block space, today the challenge is different. There is more capacity available, yet building and operating a chain remains complex.“The technical complexity is mostly solved,” Jin explains. “But the operational complexity is definitely not.”Launching a blockchain is not just about spinning up code. It requires validators, economic design, token distribution, and ongoing coordination. Saga abstracts that operational burden. Builders submit a configuration request, and Saga’s mainnet validators automatically spin up a fully connected, decentralized chain, complete with bridging and orchestration. The model works more like AWS than a traditional blockchain launch, with predictable infrastructure costs instead of open-ended gas economics.Underneath that architecture is a deeper critique of blockchain economics. “Blockchain economics is terrible for everybody involved,” Jin says bluntly. Most networks depend on gas fees for both spam prevention and revenue, but Jin argues those functions should be separated. In Saga’s model, infrastructure costs are minimized and predictable, while long-term revenue should come from the economic activity built on top of applications, not from taxing every transaction.He points to Solana as a partial step in that direction, where gas is cheap enough to fade into the background and much of the value accrues elsewhere in the stack. Saga aims to push that further by removing gas as a core revenue mechanism and focusing instead on enabling sustainable application-layer economies.The conversation also explores a broader debate in crypto: whether blockchain’s primary use case is finance or something else entirely. Jin rejects the distinction. “Finance is just one of the rails in which you create an economy,” he says. From his perspective, blockchain is fundamentally an economy-generation tool. Whether the use case is gaming, commerce, prediction markets, or payments, the underlying goal is building and coordinating new digital economies more efficiently.Looking ahead, Saga is moving upstream from infrastructure into applications, particularly at the intersection of AI and commerce. The team is exploring how crypto rails and AI tooling can simplify merchant activity, advertising, and digital payments while hiding the “gunkiness” of Web3 from end users.The long-term vision is clear: remove friction layer by layer until blockchain becomes invisible. When that happens, users won’t ask whether something is “Web3” or “finance.” They’ll simply use applications that are cheaper, faster, and more aligned with the digital economies they power.

In this episode of Exponential, Joao Reginatto joins to discuss the future of digital money and the role M0 is playing in making stablecoins more customizable, composable, and interoperable. As Reginatto explains, M0 is building “an operating system for digital money” — a platform that allows institutions and application developers to create their own tailored forms of stablecoins, all while inheriting a shared set of interoperable standards.“The premise is that money is plural,” Reginatto says. “In the traditional world, every commercial bank issues a slightly different version of the same currency. We accept that because there’s strong interoperability. In crypto, that’s missing — and that’s what M0 is working to fix.”

In this episode of Exponential, Kevin Lehtiniitty, CEO of Borderless, shares how his team is building a new kind of financial network — one where stablecoins move across global corridors just as easily as traditional money, but with far less friction.Lehtiniitty brings deep experience to the problem. He helped launch TrueUSD, one of the earliest U.S.-based fully reserved stablecoins, and now leads Borderless, which he describes as the first stablecoin payments network. Unlike individual stablecoins or isolated on/off ramps, Borderless acts as a connectivity layer across more than 77 countries, abstracting the complexity of moving money across jurisdictions, banking systems, and rails.“We want to live in a world where blockchain-based finance powers everyday experiences — but does so in the background, where people don’t notice,” he explains. The goal is to support global fintech builders who want to launch neobank-like apps using stablecoins without needing to integrate dozens of local providers or manage fragmented APIs.He emphasizes that payments isn’t just a technology problem. “If you aren’t able to also solve for compliance and the risk elements, it doesn’t really go anywhere.”A recurring theme throughout the conversation is credible neutrality. “Circle has no incentive — in fact, a disincentive — for their payments network to support or promote their competitive products,” Lehtiniitty says. Borderless, by contrast, aims to be an open, interoperable network similar to Visa or SWIFT — not another walled garden with “blockchain lipstick.”That philosophy also applies to infrastructure. “We need to really focus on two things,” he says. “One, the underlying blockchain infrastructure needs to be permissionless and open. And two, stablecoin networks can’t be side projects — they need to be credibly neutral.”In addition to infrastructure, Borderless is also building visibility. Lehtiniitty reveals they’ve assembled what they believe is the world’s largest dataset of stablecoin-to-fiat FX prices and now publish a public benchmark to help the ecosystem understand where stablecoins outperform traditional remittance rails.

In this episode of Exponential, Zohar Bronfman, co-founder and CEO of Pecan AI, unpacks the role of predictive AI in today’s business landscape — and why it’s quickly becoming indispensable.At its core, predictive AI estimates the likelihood of future events using massive amounts of data. Zohar explains: “In very general terms, it’s the ability to make some form of a statistical likelihood estimation of any type of future event.” He contrasts this with the limitations of human decision-making: “Our mind can take into consideration three or four pieces of information for a given task… Predictive AI would basically take 1500 data points.” Zohar draws a line between generative AI, which mimics human-like reasoning, and predictive AI, which is optimized for decision-making at scale. This capability makes predictive AI critical for business operations, particularly when it comes to modeling customer behavior, forecasting, and operational decisions. As Zohar puts it: “The most successful businesses… Amazon, Meta, Google… they all use predictive AI extensively.”  But predictive AI still faces major hurdles. One is data normalization — unlike standardized text used in language models, proprietary business data is highly idiosyncratic. “It’s like different languages… it’s extremely hard to transfer learning that happened on one business’s data.”Zohar also points to an under-discussed challenge: causality. “AI today… is correlational analysis, not causal analysis. The fact that something is going to happen doesn’t mean that you can affect it.”

In this episode of Exponential, Wucklace, a self-taught developer and creator of Exhibition DeFi, shares his path from fashion design to building onchain — and why he’s working a new kind of platform on Nexus.His journey started with crypto trading and quickly deepened. “I love the concept of total ownership,” he says, recalling his first experience with non-custodial wallets. “There is no restriction, no permission. I can do anything I like with the wallet. That got me curious.” That curiosity led him to question the way token launches work today. “Once a token dies, the project barely lives,” he says. “I believe the issue is in the way we launch tokens."His solution is Exhibition DeFi, a deterministic token launch platform built on Nexus. “If there is anything important, it must be defined before the launch,” he explains. That includes parameters like supply, liquidity, distribution, and funding targets — all enforced by the protocol.For Wucklace, Nexus was the natural fit. “Nexus does not treat verifiability as an option,” he says. “It is built into the execution layer.”  That alignment gave him the confidence to move beyond a demo and start building toward a production-ready protocol.His advice to other developers is to resist hype and focus on what matters. “A developer should define the rules before anything else,” he says. “Do your work based on what we really need — what will bring the mass adoption we’re looking for.” Looking ahead, he’s focused on refining Exhibition DeFi and prototyping additional utilities to help other builders with token distribution and onchain workflows. 

In this episode of Exponential, Oliwer Nastaziak, chief growth officer at Fren.One, shares what it’s like to build and moderate internet-native communities — and why those communities matter more than ever.Oliwer has been deep in the trenches of community operations for years, first as a Telegram moderator and now helping lead Fren.One, a firm he describes as “a community operating system.”  The FriendOne team works to manage everything from real-time support to scam prevention, all while fostering long-term relationships and infrastructure.

In this episode of Exponential, Joseph Zhang, co-founder and CEO of CatchBack, explains how a side hustle flipping Pokémon cards evolved into a full-stack collectibles trading platform. Combining lessons from crypto infrastructure with firsthand experience in collectibles, CatchBack introduces a new model for how real-world assets can trade online.“Crypto taught me about liquidity,” Joseph says. “In collectibles, things move slowly. Our goal was to bring the efficiency of crypto tooling to physical trading cards.” 

In this episode of Exponential, Aisling Connolly, Chief Strategy Officer at TACEO, joins the show to unpack the deeper technical and philosophical motivations behind verifiable finance. With a background in mathematics, economics, and cryptography, Ais has long been drawn to using rigorous math to solve real-world problems — a mindset that eventually brought her from traditional payments to privacy infrastructure for blockchains.“We’re building this network for private shared state,” Ais explains, referring to TACEO’s architectural vision. “How can we have it so that we have verifiability, composability, and privacy?” The company’s design leverages multiparty computation (MPC) alongside zero-knowledge proofs, enabling parties to compute on encrypted data while generating proofs of correctness — without exposing sensitive information.Ais contrasts today’s onchain possibilities with the legacy systems she encountered in traditional finance. “In the TradTech world, you just had to trust the banks and the tech companies… because you only had to trust one or two people,” she explains. “With blockchain, you get verifiability without needing to trust anyone.” But that shift also exposes a tradeoff: “You can go check your transactions, but you lose the privacy.” For Ais, this tension between trustlessness and discretion has been a through-line in her career: “I’ve always been focused on the same problem — how can we have verifiability, but with this layer of privacy?”While privacy has historically been misunderstood or deprioritized, Ais sees the value proposition becoming clearer. “People already do make the choice — they use VPNs, encrypted messengers. And if I can use a privacy protocol that transfers in one second and costs half a cent, I’m not losing efficiency.”She also points out that many legacy financial systems are held together by inertia, not performance. “If you factor in the real cost of running legacy financial systems — which are 30 years of things built on top of things — they’re not efficient. They’re crumbling.”As new use cases emerge at the intersection verifiability and finance, Ais believes the infrastructure being built today will soon become the default. “Most people will be using verifiable finance,” she says. “Whether you know it or not.”

In a world where AI can generate realistic images in seconds, Faust founder and CEO, Kosuke July Hata, who goes by July, is building a new kind of camera — one that proves a photo was actually taken by a human, on a specific device, at a specific time and place.Roc Camera is a compact, point-and-shoot–style device that embeds cryptographic proofs into every image it captures. “It’s a camera that takes verifiably real photos in the age of AI,” July says. “It can prove that the photo could have only been taken by this specific camera.” The camera works by signing sensor data at capture time using a private key embedded in the hardware. These signatures are bundled with the photo to enable later verification. We've covered a similar topic during our episode on verifiable media, and have an earlier blog post that explains how verifiable media fits into the larger vision for verifiability.

In Episode 16 of Exponential, Alec James from the Nexus product team introduces a major new release: the Nexus DEX Alpha, a core protocol component designed to deliver deep liquidity and high-performance trading from the ground up.The Nexus DEX Alpha is the testnet version of a product that will operate as an enshrined order book exchange built directly into the layer one. This architectural choice gives it meaningful advantages in performance, composability, and developer experience. “It is part of the layer one itself,” Alec explains. “Anyone who comes to build assets or protocols on top of Nexus will benefit immediately from a highly efficient exchange with deep liquidity.” The DEX Alpha is being released in an early, community-focused phase.  The goal is to collect feedback, stress test performance, and bring early builders into the ecosystem. “We’re looking for high-quality first users,” Alec adds. “We’re not necessarily looking for people who will farm this and move on to the next thing.” The DEX also represents a philosophical shift. While most blockchains avoid protocol-level applications in the name of neutrality, Nexus takes a more opinionated approach. “If you want to have a high-performance financial layer, there are some primitives that should be native,” Alec says. By enshrining these functions, Nexus removes friction for developers and accelerates time to market for new financial products.More at nexus.xyz/trade.

In this episode of Exponential, Dylan Kawalec, Head of Developer Relations at Phala Network, breaks down how Phala is building verifiable compute infrastructure using trusted hardware and open-source tooling. The goal: privacy-preserving execution environments that don’t rely on centralized cloud services or blind trust.In the episode, we mention a podcast that Dylan recorded with Nexus Chief Scientist Jens Groth. Here is the link to that show.More details about this episode are at blog.nexus.xyz.

In this episode of Exponential, Genzio Media co-founder and CEO Zack shares his perspective on the maturing Web3 landscape — and why the next wave will look very different from the last.A crypto native since 2011, Zack launched Genzio in 2022 to fill a gap he encountered firsthand while working at Ripple and OKX: Web3 companies needed partners who actually understood crypto. “People are going to need to continue to get help from people who really understand this industry,” he said. Genzio now serves dozens of projects, offering growth, content, and community strategy — and giving Zack a panoramic view of the evolving market.Right now, he sees three themes dominating the space: tokenized real-world assets, AI, and stablecoins. “The companies that are in Web3, such as Nexus, who are implementing AI, I think are going to be the winners of this next cycle,” Zack said. He also pointed to the rising global utility of stablecoins. “At the airport in Bolivia, a lot of goods are actually denominated in USDT. That’s a game changer.”

In episode 13 of Exponential, Nexus founder and CEO Daniel Marin outlines near-term roadmap and long-term ambitions. With Testnet III reaching more than three million participants, Nexus is preparing for its most significant milestone yet: mainnet launch in Q1 2026.

For Dynamic co-founder and CEO Itai Turbahn, the future of crypto is in infrastructure. His company, Dynamic, builds wallet tooling designed to disappear behind the apps we already use. In this episode of Exponential, Itai lays out a compelling thesis: the next wave of crypto adoption won’t look like crypto at all.“The next billion users are already here. We’re not bringing them to crypto — we’re bringing crypto to them.”More episode info is here: https://blog.nexus.xyz/exponential-episode-12/.

In a digital world saturated with manipulated media and synthetic imagery, trust is no longer a given. Photojournalist David Butow has spent his career documenting real events — from the war in Iraq to protests in Washington — and he’s now at the forefront of a growing movement: making digital images verifiable at the source.In episode 11 of Exponential, we explore the promise and friction of C2PA, an emerging standard for content provenance that embeds cryptographic proof directly into digital files.

In Episode 10 of Exponential, AI Seer founder and CEO Dennis Yap and AI Seer CTO Shahruj Rashid join to discuss their mission: building AI systems that can detect and dismantle misinformation at internet scale.You can find more info about this podcast on blog.nexus.xyz/podcast.

In Episode 9 of Exponential, Jim Nasr, CEO of Acoer, joins us to tackle one of the most broken but vital systems in modern life: healthcare data. His story starts where many do — with a personal experience that revealed just how fragmented and opaque medical data really is. But unlike most, he decided to build something better.Acoer is a software company rethinking health infrastructure from the ground up, using cryptography, blockchain, and user-centric design to make data more connected, more trustworthy, and more usable.Find out more about this episode at blog.nexus.xyz

In a space that moves at the speed of Twitter and trades on memes, launching a print magazine about crypto feels almost radical. But for veteran journalists Zack Seward and Joon Ian Wong, that’s exactly the point. Their new project, Use Case, is a quarterly publication designed to document the parts of crypto that actually matter — the systems that work, the ideas that endure, and the people building things with real-world impact. “Crypto to me is wonderfully ambivalent,” Zack says. “There’s a lot of contradiction. That’s where the most interesting stories live.”Born from a conversation on a boat in Bangkok, Use Case aims to be what the industry lacks: a thoughtful, credible artifact that treats crypto not as hype or headline fodder, but as a serious cultural and technological shift. With contributors ranging from essayists to illustrators, the first issue blends deep reporting with original art and longform storytelling. 

In Episode 7 of Exponential, Grigore Roșu — professor, computer scientist, and founder of Pi Squared — joins the show to explore a bold thesis: blockchains as we know them are only a first step.The future of web3, Grigore argues, lies in universal computation, massively parallel verification, and an evolution beyond the bottlenecks of ordered chains.Pi Squared, a Nexus partner, is building toward that future. With its FastSet protocol and a new approach to trust, the company is rethinking how verifiability and decentralization scale — while keeping verifiability at the core.

In Episode 6 of Exponential, Dylan Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Pond, joins us to unpack a fast-emerging frontier: helping early-stage AI startups launch, scale, and find product-market fit through a new kind of internet-native capital platform.At a time when AI tooling is accelerating and the barriers to launching new products are dropping, Pond is building infrastructure for what comes next — connecting early-stage founders with capital, distribution, and feedback loops in real time.“Pond is an early-stage AI startup marketplace,” Dylan explained. “We help AI projects scale and get funded. Everything else—DevOps, infra, go-to-market—follows from that.”

As the Web3 space matures, projects are rethinking how to grow and sustain communities. In Episode 5 of Exponential, Zach Heerwagen, co-founder and CEO of Snag, joined us to explore how “questing” is emerging as a powerful mechanism for aligning users, incentives, and long-term network health.Zach defines questing as Web3’s take on loyalty. In traditional business models, loyalty is mostly transactional — based on how much a customer spends. In contrast, Web3 broadens the definition of meaningful engagement.“Questing is really Web3’s term for loyalty,” Zach explained. “There are three core contribution types: financial, social, and time-based.” That means rewards can be tied not just to token purchases or NFT mints, but also to social engagement or participation in network activities like compute contribution — something Nexus is actively building toward.

In the fourth episode of Exponential, Samuel Judson — head of zkVM engineering at Nexus — joins the show to unpack the science, strategy, and systems thinking behind zero-knowledge cryptography. Sam brings a rare combination of perspectives: part mathematician, part systems engineer, and deeply attuned to the social and regulatory dimensions of cryptographic technology. This primer-style episode traces the evolution of zero-knowledge proofs, the motivation for building the Nexus zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM), and why ZK is becoming foundational to how trust is engineered into software systems.

In Episode 3 of Exponential, we sat down with Nexus Chief Strategy Officer Alex Fowler for a conversation about the forces shaping the next era of the internet.With a career that spans bioethics, early cryptographic policy, and consumer technology, Alex brings a rare combination of philosophical grounding and technical experience to one of the most urgent questions of our time: as machines begin acting on our behalf, who can we trust?

The rapid expansion of AI systems has ignited a fundamental question: How do humans stay meaningfully involved as intelligent software grows more capable, autonomous, and ubiquitous?The second episode of Exponential: A Nexus Podcast features Jordan Gray, co-founder of PublicAI, a startup working to ensure human participation remains central to the future of artificial intelligence. In a wide-ranging discussion, Gray outlines how PublicAI is developing infrastructure to support distributed human intelligence — a system designed to complement large-scale AI with real-time human oversight, input, and accountability.Learn more about this episode at blog.nexus.xyz.

What if you could hear the future being built—one idea, one insight, one proof at a time?We’re thrilled to announce the launch of Exponential, a new Nexus podcast about the people, code, and capital shaping the frontier of technology. Each episode features conversations with founders, engineers, and thinkers working at the edge of what’s possible—from cryptography and AI to systems design and economic coordination.Our mission is simple: to surface the deep motivations and bold architectures behind tomorrow’s most important systems.To open the series, we sat down with Nexus founder and CEO Daniel Marin for a wide-ranging conversation on the origins of the company, the pursuit of verifiable computation, and the foundational vision driving Nexus forward.