Money Moves

In this episode of Money Moves, we delve into the complex world of decentralized finance (DeFi) and its intersection with traditional finance (TradFi). We explore recent events, including a $300 million hack, that highlight the vulnerabilities and risks within DeFi. Our discussion covers the tension between the instantaneous, permissionless nature of DeFi and the structured, regulated environment of TradFi. We examine how institutions like BlackRock are beginning to adopt blockchain technologies and the implications of this convergence. The episode also addresses the ethical and security challenges posed by DeFi's reliance on bridges and centralized control, questioning whether DeFi is truly ready for mainstream adoption.

The de-dollarization narrative is everywhere. BRICS alternatives, Gulf states rethinking their Treasury holdings, a digital yuan push from Beijing, sovereign gold-buying at multi-decade highs. So, is the dollar in trouble? In Episode 3, Samantha, Ian, and Dave take the debate on directly. Ian lays out the framework he uses to test every de-dollarization claim he hears, and systematically works through why the usual candidates don’t yet hold up.But the bigger surprise in this episode is the hidden risk to the dollar almost nobody is talking about. It’s not monetary policy. It’s not sanctions overreach. It’s something far more physical, and the U.S. is, by Ian’s own assessment, “literally nowhere” on it.

A stablecoin is a type of cryptocurrency designed to maintain a stable value by pegging it to a reserve asset, most commonly fiat currencies like the U.S. dollar. Unlike volatile cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, they provide price stability for transactions, trading, and remittances, often acting as a bridge between traditional money and digital assets. Stablecoins are being adopted at a rapid pace… globally. They routinely surpass Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, and Venmo in transaction volume, and now move roughly $10 trillion a month. As Dave points out in this week’s episode on Money Moves, it took the card networks 75 years to get to those numbers. Stablecoins did it in five.Stablecoin issuers Circle and Tether are now among the largest holders of U.S. government debt in the world. Tether alone made more money last year than Goldman Sachs.In Episode 02, Samantha, Ian, and Dave dig into how we actually got here from the GENIUS Act finally passing on a bipartisan basis, to the White House Council of Economic Advisers openly calling out the banking lobby, to Western Union quietly launching its own stablecoin. If you spent the last cycle assuming stablecoins were a crypto sideshow, this is the episode that recalibrates.

Money Moves is a new weekly show from Mercury Fund early-stage investor Samantha Lewis, built with two co-hosts she leads and invests behind: Ian Epstein, a former senior portfolio manager at Autonomy Capital (one of the world's best-performing macro funds in its era) and now co-CEO of Profiter, and Dave Sutter, a crypto operator since 2012, previously head of network strategy at Centre, the Coinbase + Circle joint venture that governs USDC, and now co-founder and CEO of OpenTrade.Eighteen months ago, crypto companies in the United States could not reliably open a bank account. Today, they're entering the S&P 500, printing billion-dollar IPOs, and getting acquired by the incumbents that once wanted them regulated out of existence. That is not a gradual shift. That is a pivot, and it is the subject of the first-ever episode of Money Moves.In our one-hour, twenty-minute launch episode, you'll get to know our digital asset experts and why the M&A flywheel, IPO window, and mainstream adoption of tokenization make this conversation so timely.