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by TRM Labs
Every other week, TRM’s Global Head of Policy, Ari Redbord, sits down with business leaders, policy makers, and investigators from across the globe to talk about the key crypto policy, regulatory and enforcement issues of the day. About TRM Labs TRM provides blockchain intelligence to help financial institutions, cryptocurrency businesses and public sector agencies detect and investigate crypto-related fraud and financial crime.
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- 2 days ago36 min
EP. 116 | Treasury’s War: Then and Now — Economic Statecraft in the Age of Technology with Juan Zarate
Juan Zarate joined the US Treasury just three weeks before September 11, 2001, and helped build the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI), transforming Treasury into a cornerstone of American national security. He later chronicled that evolution in Treasury’s War, the definitive account of how financial intelligence, sanctions, and economic power became central tools of US statecraft.In this episode, Juan joins Ari to discuss how the post-9/11 financial architecture still underpins U.S. national security—and how it must evolve for an era of cryptocurrency, AI, and emerging technologies.
- 2 weeks ago33 min
EP. 115 | Criminals Don't Have Compliance Officers: The AI Arms Race in AML with ComplyAdvantage’s Vatsa Narasimha
Criminals have no compliance officers and no regulators looking over their shoulder. That means their barrier to adopting new technology — including AI — is effectively zero. They don't need a tool to work for five years. They need it to work for the next five hours. Vatsa Narasimha, CEO of ComplyAdvantage, has been watching this asymmetry define the fraud landscape for years, and his answer is a platform built to match it.Vatsa joins Ari to talk through what building ComplyAdvantage have taught him about fighting financial crime as a network problem rather than a point-in-time compliance exercise.The conversation covers the industrialization of fraud (synthetic IDs, money mule recruitment at scale, AI-enabled targeting of retirees and immigrant workers), the architecture behind ComplyAdvantage's new Mesh platform, and the case for information sharing as a structural defense against crime networks whose strength lies in their interconnection. TRM focuses on the on-chain world; ComplyAdvantage focuses on the off-chain. Together, Vatsa argues, they cover the full picture.
- Jul 1, 202644 min
EP. 114 | The Women Rewriting Crypto's Rulebook with DEX in the City
On this TRM Talks, Ari sits down with the team behind Unchained DEX in the City — three of the sharpest legal minds in crypto and three of his closest friends — for a wide-ranging conversation about the regulatory questions reshaping the industry in real time.TuongVy Le, Jessi Brooks, and Katherine Kirkpatrick Bos bring their distinct backgrounds as prosecutors, general counsels, and enforcement attorneys to bear on what investor protection, custody, and market integrity actually look like in a market structure with no historical precedent.The SEC has provided guidance and clarity, the CFTC is emerging as a consequential voice on digital assets, perps and prediction markets , and the work ahead is proving that a new market structure can deliver on those fundamentals.The conversation covers the legal architecture being built right now, the national security stakes of DeFi exploits, the case for privacy as a precondition for institutional capital, and the founding mission of the show: amplifying the women writing crypto's rulebook. No Mr. Big’s on this one, just the Carrie Bradshaws of crypto providing cutting edge legal insights.Origin stories, journeys, and genuine friendship make this one of the most fun episodes of the year.
- Jun 17, 202641 min
EP. 113 | Quantum, Hacks, and Privacy: Inside Blockchain Security with Penn's Brett Falk
If a sufficiently powerful quantum computer came online tomorrow, every token on every blockchain would be a target — Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana all share signature schemes that pre-date the post-quantum era. The math has been clear since the 1990s. What's been missing is the machine. That uncomfortable truth anchors this week's TRM Talks.Brett Falk, research faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Crypto and Society Lab, joins Ari to work through what that actually means — why Shor's algorithm threatens every chain, what NIST's 2024 post-quantum standards mean in practice, and why Ethereum is better positioned than Bitcoin to respond. They also dig into the back-to-back Drift and Kelp DAO exploits and what made the DPRK playbook behind them unlike anything we've seen before, and into the cryptographic tools — zero-knowledge proofs, secure multi-party computation, credential-based KYC — that let users prove compliance without turning every business into a ransomware target. The math to thread that needle already exists.
- Jun 3, 202633 min
EP. 112 | The Golden State of Crypto: Regulating Digital Assets with Brynly Llyr, California DFPI
Brynly Llyr has deep roots in fintech and blockchain — in-house at eBay, PayPal, and Ripple, where she served as one of the first general counsels in crypto, then founding team at Celo, then Head of Blockchain and Digital Assets at the World Economic Forum. Now she’s Deputy Commissioner for Digital Financial Assets at the California DFPI, leading the rollout of the Digital Financial Assets Law, which goes live July 1, 2026, covering exchanges, custodians, stablecoin issuers, and crypto kiosks across the world’s fourth-largest economy.Ari Redbord, TRM’s Global Head of Policy, sits down with Brynly to talk through what California is actually trying to solve. IC3 data puts the state at the top of the country for crypto-related fraud losses, with serious harm to elderly residents and teenagers under 17. Her thesis: licensed intermediaries that recognize fraud patterns are the most powerful lever a regulator has.They also dig into how blockchain’s public visibility changes what supervisors can see in real time — and what that means for every licensed business managing its own risk. The conversation covers AI’s role in regulation, what success looks like a year from now, and the universal experience of feeding teenage boys.
- May 20, 202635 min
EP. 111 | Compliance Built In, Not Bolted On: Inside Zodia Custody's Institutional Playbook with Sophie Bowler
Behind every laundered transaction is a real victim, a real crime, and a real reason to do this work well. That conviction has shaped Sophie Bowler's entire career — from her first job working on the EU's Fourth Anti-Money Laundering Directive as an intern in Brussels, to her current role as Global Chief Risk and Compliance Officer at Zodia Custody.In this conversation with Ari Redbord, Global Head of Policy at TRM Labs, Sophie traces her path from the European Parliament to leading risk and compliance across six jurisdictions.She unpacks what it really took to secure Zodia's MiCA license in Luxembourg in December 2024 and explains how the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) has forced firms to rethink vendor risk, criticality assessments, and continuity from the ground up.Sophie shares why Zodia joined TRM's Beacon Network, how real-time information sharing across the industry has changed the speed at which illicit funds can be identified and interdicted, and why this kind of coordinated response is uniquely possible in crypto.
- May 6, 202634 min
EP. 110 | The Decentralization of Money: Building the Internet Capital Market on Solana with Catherine Gu
Catherine Gu has always been at the center of the shift toward the decentralization of money, a transformation that was once theoretical but is now actively reshaping global financial markets through stablecoins and on-chain infrastructure.Inspired in part by Hayek’s vision of competing private forms of money, Catherine’s work sits at the intersection of that idea and its real-world implementation. As Head of Product for Digital Assets at the Solana Foundation, she is helping build what is increasingly viewed as the internet capital market, where speed, scale, and global access redefine how value moves. Before joining Solana, she was one of the earliest members of Visa’s crypto team, where she spent years bridging traditional finance and blockchain and leading the development of tokenized asset infrastructure designed for financial institutions.In this conversation, Ari and Catherine trace that journey and explore what it means for the future of financial markets. We discuss why Solana has emerged as a critical platform for stablecoin activity, what it means to embed compliance and trust into infrastructure from the outset, and how performance, liquidity, and developer resilience are shaping the next phase of institutional adoption.This is no longer a debate about whether money will evolve. It is a conversation about how that evolution is being built in real time.
- Apr 22, 202635 min
EP. 109 | Building Institutional Rails On-chain — A Conversation with Canton Co-Founder Shaul Kfir
When the Bitcoin white paper landed in 2008, most people saw a payment system. Shaul Kfir saw a privacy problem — because he had spent years working on the zero-knowledge proof technology that would eventually make private transactions possible on blockchains.That instinct shaped everything that followed, including the Canton Network, the blockchain he co-founded that now moves trillions of dollars a month for some of the world's largest financial institutions.Shaul's path is unlike most in this space. He co-authored libsnark, the seminal zkSNARK library that helped bring zero-knowledge proofs to blockchains, studied under Turing Award winner Ron Rivest at MIT, and built one of Israel's first Bitcoin brokerages before turning his attention to the infrastructure problem that would define his career: how do you build a blockchain that institutions can actually use?In this episode, Ari sits down with Shaul to explore why privacy was a non-negotiable design principle from day one, why the industry is now at a genuine inflection point as institutions move from private to public blockchain environments, and what the beginning of institutional DeFi actually looks like in practice. They also dig into the tension between privacy and compliance and why regulators should focus on desired system properties rather than prescribing specific technologies.When he is not building financial infrastructure, Shaul is on the water — a former Israeli Navy Lieutenant Commander who still races sailboats, once captured a whale breach on his Ray-Ban Meta glasses mid-race, and finds the parallel between navigating a storm at sea and building in crypto surprisingly easy to draw.
About TRM Talks
Every other week, TRM’s Global Head of Policy, Ari Redbord, sits down with business leaders, policy makers, and investigators from across the globe to talk about the key crypto policy, regulatory and enforcement issues of the day. About TRM Labs TRM provides blockchain intelligence to help financial institutions, cryptocurrency businesses and public sector agencies detect and investigate crypto-related fraud and financial crime.
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