Jonathan Shaffer, co-founder and CEO of Fission, joins Frank Chaparro to explain why tokenized funds need instant exit liquidity, how private credit and venture funds are coming onchain, and why he sees liquid private markets as the most important story in crypto, and perhaps the second biggest fix U.S. capital markets need.

Aya Kantorovich, co-founder and co-CEO of August and Upshift, explains on The Desk why she sees vaults as the way DeFi reaches $16 trillion of US managed money, as $300 billion in stablecoins leaves neobanks, fintechs, and wallets with idle balances that need yield. She says Upshift's revenue has moved from DeFi and ecosystem vaults to exchange and neobank earn products and RWA capital formation, puts RWA demand in the billions of dollars, and expects vault infrastructure to plug into large institutions within 2 to 3 years.

GSR's Alex Taaffe and Andy Baehr join Frank Chaparro during SALT Wyoming in Jackson Hole. Alex explains why a slow market for token launches could be healthy and why perps are reaching new audiences. Andy breaks down what low volume and compressed volatility say about the bottom, and why DeFi still needs a real fixed income market.

Chris Perkins of Franklin Crypto joins Frank Chaparro to explain why institutions now face more risk from staying out of crypto than getting in, why he isn't worried about a return to Gensler-era rules, and why post-quantum cryptography could become one of crypto's biggest tailwinds.

Andrew McCormick, who recently joined Chainlink to lead its institutional push, sits down with Frank Chaparro. He explains why tokenized equities are Chainlink's fastest-growing business, why big banks now want to talk DeFi, and how tokenization could open markets to the 80% of Americans who've never placed a trade.

Anna Kazlauskas, co-founder and CEO of Vana, explains on The Desk that public internet text is running out as AI training data, that labs are turning to private data, and that knowledge not already in the models is becoming the scarce asset. She says Vana has passed 1.5 million users and that its Vega upgrade moves writes from an 18-second, three-confirmation wait to about 50 milliseconds, and she argues that platforms like Amazon will favor themselves over consumers as agents start shopping.

Bhaji Illuminati, CEO and co-founder of Centrifuge, joins Frank Chaparro at RWA Summit in Brooklyn, the event Centrifuge started in 2023. She explains why asset managers now begin tokenization with real onchain demand, how Janus Henderson went from T-bills to its flagship CLO strategy, and why Centrifuge is converting its token into equity.

Edward Woodford, founder and CEO of zerohash, explains on The Desk what institutional stablecoin activity looks like from the infrastructure layer: which corridors and use cases produce real volume, why stablecoins became the majority of his business, and why licensing and compliance, not technology, is what fintechs are actually buying. zerohash reached a $1 billion valuation in September 2025 on a $104 million round led by Interactive Brokers, with Morgan Stanley, Apollo-managed funds, and SoFi participating.

Robert Leshner, CEO of Superstate, returns to The Crypto Tape during the RWA Summit. He argues that most tokenized stocks are really tokenized brokerage balances, that the traction so far looks anti-institutional, and that the real money in onchain equities will be made on the trading side, not issuance.

Hayden Adams, founder of Uniswap, joins Frank Chaparro at the RWA Summit to argue that tokenization is the digitization of value. He explains why AMMs win on cost of capital rather than raw efficiency, how correlated pairs decouple what TradFi bundles in dollars, and why Uniswap is a liquidity network, not a decentralized exchange.