The Gwart Show | Bitcoin Tech & Culture

Lyn Alden joins Gwart to talk about the Coldcard security incident, changing self-custody heuristics, game theory behind Bitcoin soft forks, and the true addressable market for stablecoins. She shares insights on MicroStrategy's reserve guidance, her new private equity holding company Orange Juice, early-stage venture thesis, and whether Bitcoin can outperform gold as the ult...

Lucas V. Schuermann, Co-Founder of Variational, joins us to talk about building a high-performance crypto brokerage model on Arbitrum. Lucas explains how Variational routes execution to TradFi venues, eliminates external market maker extraction through its in-house LP, introduces flat-rate swaps to fix funding rate volatility, and builds isolated smart contracts to protect us...

John Wang, Lead of Crypto & Perps at Kalshi, joins us to talk about bringing CFTC-regulated crypto perpetual futures and prediction markets to the US. John shares insights on growing Kalshi's crypto business, expanding across 140 countries, institutional liquidity, standardized compute indices, and why regulatory compliance scales better than offshore exchanges.

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Christian Catalini, Co-founder of Lightspark joins us to talk about his journey from the MIT Bitcoin experiment to co-founding Libra. Christian breaks down why regulators killed Libra, the limits of the Lightning Network, and why Bitcoin needs new opcodes. He also shares his framework for AI value accrual, the power of verifiable open-source models, and the reality of agentic...

Ivo Crnkovic-Rubsamen, Co-Founder of Pascal Trading joins us to talk about building the next generation of prediction markets. Ivo shares insights from his time at Bridgewater, D.E. Shaw, and dYdX, explaining how Pascal is solving major capital efficiency issues in DeFi. We dive deep into oracle-free price discovery, order book design, and how to scale robust leverage extensi...