The DeFi Decoded Podcast

Join Alex Tapscott as he decodes the world of building in Canada with special guest Daniel Debow, Founder of Debow Musical Instruments and chair of Build Canada. Listen in as Daniel, the serial founder behind Workbrain, Rypple and Helpful and a former Shopify VP, introduces Torch. It's a new electroacoustic "campfire instrument" made of real wood, and it has first-timers playing a song in minutes. He explains how magnets vibrate the wood to make sound, why 90% of beginner guitarists quit within a year, and why he calls Torch a "mission project" rather than a passion project. Alex and Daniel also get into Shopify's hypergrowth years and why applications build platforms, not the other way around. They cover how Build Canada grew from AI-drafted policy memos into polls, candidate surveys and meetups across the country, and why Canada should aim to be number one rather than settle for keeping pace.

Join Alex Tapscott as he decodes the world of AI compute with returning guest Greg Osuri, Founder of Akash Network. Listen in as Greg explains why one lab's soft quarter says little about real demand when only 2.4 million people use agents and supply chains are already maxed out, with four-year waits for transformers and fourteen-year waits for turbines. He explains why AI will become a utility like the internet rather than a subscription like the news, why a $200 plan buying roughly $8,000 of compute means the subsidized party is ending, and how Akash is nearing a trillion tokens a month while doubling monthly. Alex and Greg also get into what's really stalling the build-out — energy, permits, community pushback and the leverage behind the CoreWeave jitters — how the shift from training to inference opens the door to homes, offices and 10-kilowatt clusters, why frontier GPUs now trade only through bilateral contracts and what tradable compute contracts could change, and why Greg believes "homes will be the future of AI."

Join Alex Tapscott as he decodes the world of fintech with special guest Jeff Adamson, co-founder of Neo Financial and Skip the Dishes. Listen in as Jeff traces the path from a five-time national wrestling champion training in the attic of a Saskatoon furniture warehouse to building two of Canada's best-known startups — and why seeing someone from the block over become a champion is what makes ambition feel possible. He explains how Skip nearly died the day it added delivery, why he calls 2008 "the best marketing coup the banks could have ever asked for," and how Neo negotiates wholesale deposit rates on behalf of billions to pass the savings back, Costco-style. Alex and Jeff also get into what breaks when stablecoins, real-time rails, open banking and agentic finance arrive at once — hot money sweeping between institutions overnight, and bidding wars in the split second between tap and approval — why credit bureaus built before women could vote are still gating home ownership, and why being great in Canada isn't enough.

Join Alex Tapscott as he decodes the world of crypto with special guest Luigi D'Onorio DeMeo, Chief Strategy and Business Officer at Aave Labs. Listen in as they trace how a peer-to-peer ETH lending experiment called ETHLend became the largest lending protocol in crypto — $80 billion in deposits and roughly $40 billion in loans at peak, on under a thousand lines of code and no back office. Luigi explains why overcollateralized lending doesn't care who you are, what borrowers actually do with the money, and why flows moved to Aave when Celsius and BlockFi blew up. Plus: why Clarity failing may advantage the risk-tolerant, why bank deposit economics break when the floor on a checking account rises, why every fintech he speaks to is already building on DeFi, and why tokenized equities are the most interesting thing to hit crypto since stablecoins.

Join Alex Tapscott as he decodes the world of crypto with special guest Stefan Rust, CEO of Truflation and former CEO of Bitcoin.com. Listen in as they dig into the number behind the number: why the government still measures inflation by survey using a methodology unchanged in a hundred years, and what changes when you aggregate hundreds of millions of daily data points instead. Stefan explains why $130 trillion is tied to the official print, how Truflation runs ~41 days ahead of the government, and why its number is sometimes lower than CPI, not higher. Plus: what actually drives Fed decisions, why Bitcoin and gold traded like risk assets, and the case that tokenized dollars are what keeps borrowing costs down.