U Unchained

Podcast

Unchained

Crypto assets and blockchain technology are about to transform every trust-based interaction of our lives, from financial services to identity to the Internet of Things. In this podcast, host Laura Shin, an independent journalist covering all things crypto, talks with industry pioneers about how crypto assets and blockchains will change the way we earn, spend and invest our money. Tune in to find out how Web 3.0, the decentralized web, will revolutionize our world.

Website ↗ Last published 31 October 2026 896 posts collected by Sputnik

Said on Unchained

“I just want to throw out there as we close the show how far crypto has come, not necessarily in a good way. In the early days, if you talked to people in the space about crypto, you were talking about Byzantine generals and you were talking about cypherpunk stuff and you were talking about sharding. We are now at the point where crypto, we're talking about credit and credit risk. And it is just so 180 from the early days because credit would be the last word that would be used.” — Robert Leshner, Unchained
Robert Leshner · 31 Oct 2026 Listen →
“Agents are becoming the buyer of a lot of tools. So if you're a DevTools company today, basically in a year, your buyer has changed from a human developer to an agent developer… What we're seeing is this is happening for everything else, and financial transactions with personal agents… they're going to need APIs to be able to do that simpler and easier.” — Nemil Dalal, Unchained
Nemil Dalal · 31 Oct 2026 Listen →
“The data structures of public blockchains are extremely traversable and transparent to the AI. So I think there's no doubt at all that agents will use programmable money on chain. The complexity of using DeFi, or looping multiple loans, that's difficult as a human. It's pretty easy for an agent to do it.” — Alex Thorn, Unchained
Alex Thorn · 30 Oct 2026 Listen →
“The AI build out is effectively funded by debasement. It's funded by enormous credit expansion in the private markets, which is effectively money printing. It's also funded literally by tax incentives, so the public treasury is subsidizing the build out in many cases. And if it goes badly, it's so intertwined in all of our markets and every person's retirement account that I think a lot of people believe that if the AI build out needs it, it will be bailed out. And that will be money printing as well.” — Alex Thorn, Unchained
Alex Thorn · 30 Oct 2026 Listen →
“I think the biggest risk is themselves… if they just like operate relatively sanely and don't go off the deep end, don't take on like trying to morally fix the freaking world, don't think that they're better than everyone else and can do things safely and no one else can… I think that they'll be fine. I think that China can't beat them. I think that Zuck can't beat them, right? But I think that there's like a very decent probability that they blow themselves up.” — Taylor Monahan, Unchained
Taylor Monahan · 29 Oct 2026 Listen →
“I actually think closed source is actually more unsafe in the long run because a, you can reverse engineer any closed source binary now like super easily, b, it's actually very hard to detect if someone has exploited or is a man in the middle or like sitting in your closed source stack. There's like no sunlight…” — Tarun Chitra, Unchained
Tarun Chitra · 24 Oct 2026 Listen →
“The hardest thing for people to navigate is like the U.S. healthcare system. It is so difficult. It is so much paperwork. It is so much complexity. The cards are stacked against the individual so badly that AI should have the biggest impact on fixing that. And the biggest losers are going to be health insurance companies. If there was any industry I would want to short, that's what I would want to short.” — Robert Leshner, Unchained
Robert Leshner · 24 Oct 2026 Listen →
“Ledger actually provides in the manual of each device a picture of the inside of the device, how things should be. But on the same page, Ledger also writes that opening your device will void the warranty.” — Mark Karpelès, Unchained
Mark Karpelès · 16 Oct 2026 Listen →
“Marquee last year was, I think, half a million Sing dollars on like a random weekday minimum spend, and it was fully booked all week last year. This year, not a single booking. And it was all shitcoin projects spending investor money on Marquee and average DJs.” — Arthur Hayes, Unchained
Arthur Hayes · 9 Oct 2026 Listen →
“Take the 193 UN members … And you make a histogram of their populations, and you'll find that half of them have less than 10 million people, and like 20% have less than 1 million people, right? … Most sovereigns are small. … So the number one asset that they have is a flag.” — Balaji Srinivasan, Unchained
Balaji Srinivasan · 9 Oct 2026 Listen →
“If it breaks ... there will be signs, but also the first thing to break is not going to be Satoshi's coins. It's going to be the most powerful people on the planet hacking the second most powerful people on the planet. Meaning probably one government hacking another government.” — Taylor Monahan, Unchained
Taylor Monahan · 8 Oct 2026 Listen →
“Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic have any idea what is happening inside their walls, inside their sandboxes, outside. They have no idea.” — Taylor Monahan, Unchained
Taylor Monahan · 10 Sep 2026 Listen →

Hosts

Unchained is hosted by Haseeb Qureshi , Tom Schmidt , Tarun Chitra , Robert Leshner , Ram Ahluwalia , Austin Campbell , Kain Warwick , Taylor Monahan , James Seyffart , Jessi Brooks , Chris Perkins and Steven Ehrlich .

Recent Episodes

  1. 31 Oct 2026

    The Chopping Block: The Binance Hack, Circle's Fast Freeze, YC's Crypto Wishlist, and ICE Bringing Hyperliquid Perps Onshore

    With Nemil Dalal

  2. 30 Oct 2026

    Bitcoin's Price May Have Bottomed. One Reason Is the AI Debasement Trade

    With Alex Thorn

  3. 29 Oct 2026

    Uneasy Money: Why Anthropic's IPO Governance Has Crypto Veterans Worried

  4. 27 Oct 2026

    Why America's New Cyber Privateers Can't Go After North Korea

    With J. Christopher Giancarlo and Ari Redbord

  5. 24 Oct 2026

    The Chopping Block: Black October, Banks Blocking AI Agents, Hyperliquid's Blockchain-Not-Bitcoin Moment, and the Visa-Fireblocks Rumor

    With Rob Hadick

  6. 23 Oct 2026

    PaperTrade Attracted $140M, Then Changed the Rules. Was It a Bait and Switch?

    With Jason Pagoulatos

  7. 22 Oct 2026

    Uneasy Money: Is the Internet Breaking Because Bots Never Get Lazy?

  8. 21 Oct 2026

    How Crypto Can Survive If AI or Quantum Computers Break Its Cryptography

    With Alex Pruden and Conor Deegan

  9. 16 Oct 2026

    Ledger Wallets Were Drained of $100 Million. Is Self-Custody Still Safe?

    With Mark Karpelès

  10. 15 Oct 2026

    Uneasy Money: Why Ledger's Supply Chain Became a Nearly $100M Target

  11. 15 Oct 2026

    The Chopping Block: The Ledger Hardware Implant, a Listening Device at OpenAI, Papertrade's 1000x House, and the Death of Technical Moats

  12. 14 Oct 2026

    Why Crypto Buybacks Are 'the Wrong Way to Allocate Capital'

    With Lorenzo Valente

Guests

Arthur Hayes (14 episodes), Sam Enzer (13 episodes), Alex Thorn (9 episodes), Guy Young (8 episodes), Rob Hadick (7 episodes), Jeff Park (7 episodes), Illia Polosukhin (7 episodes), Peter Van Valkenburgh (6 episodes), Eric Balchunas (6 episodes), Mert Mumtaz (6 episodes), Paul Grewal (5 episodes), Nic Carter (5 episodes), and 517 more.