Crypto Continental - The European lens on crypto, macro-finance, and regulation.

About Crypto Continental - The European lens on crypto, macro-finance, and regulation.

MetaMarkets is the European lens on macro-finance and digital assets. We cover capital markets, crypto regulation, and the frequently overlooked geopolitical implications of financial policy. This podcast maps out the forces shaping today’s economic landscape. Jan Fritsche and Jón Egilsson host the show. They bring a rare combination of central banking leadership, economic research, crypto entrepreneurship, and Web3 cybersecurity expertise. Dr. Jan Philipp Fritsche is a co-founder of Bermuda, a compliant privacy solution for Ethereum, and the Strategic Director at Oak Security, a Web3 cybersecurity firm that pioneered economic attack vectors in decentralized systems. Jan worked at the European Central Bank, Bundesbank, Deutsche Bank, and served on the European Commission's Monetary Expert Panel. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics. Jón Egilsson served as Chairman of the Central Bank of Iceland following the 2008 financial crisis. He is also the co-founder and chairman of Monerium, the first company to issue fiat currency on-chain. Jón holds a Ph.D. in Economics and a master’s in Engineering. He teaches at King’s Business School and regularly contributes to Forbes, writing on stablecoins, digital currencies, and monetary sovereignty. Jan Fritsche worked on market-based finance, money markets, and derivatives at the European Central Bank. He also served as a member of the Monetary Expert Panel of the European Commission. Today, Jan is the Managing Director of Oak Security, a cybersecurity firm for Web3 that pioneered economic attack vectors in decentralized systems. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics and previously conducted research at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin), focusing on fiscal policy, monetary dynamics, and uncertainty.

Publisher

metamarkets

Category

technology

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

14 Apr 2025

Latest episode

26 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

20 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   26 Sept 2026

   Ivo Jeník | CGAP, the World Bank and Financial Inclusion

   MetaMarkets is hosted by Jan Philipp Fritsche, co-founder of Bermuda, a compliant privacy solution. Strategic Director at Oak Security, a Web3 cybersecurity firm pioneering research on economic and systemic risks in decentralized systems. https://www.linkedin.com/in/janf/ The Guest Ivo Jeník leads work on frontier regulatory architecture, tokenization, open finance, and AML/CFT at CGAP, an innovation lab for inclusive finance hosted at the World Bank. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivo-jen%C3%ADk-31884847/ Financial innovation is often discussed from the perspective of developed markets: faster settlement, cheaper transactions, new asset classes and new ways to move money. For CGAP, the question starts somewhere else. Can new financial infrastructure actually improve the lives of people who remain underserved by the traditional financial system? In this episode of MetaMarkets, Jan is joined by Ivo Jeník to discuss CGAP, the World Bank, financial inclusion and the role that technologies such as tokenization and open finance could play in building a more accessible financial system. Ivo begins with what CGAP actually is. Hosted at the World Bank, CGAP is a research organization whose mandate is to advance financial inclusion. Its work focuses particularly on people living on low incomes and in low-income countries, asking how access to useful financial services can improve their lives and economic opportunities. Research is only part of the job. CGAP experiments with innovation, works in policy and regulatory spaces and tries to identify where changes in technology, market structure or regulation can meaningfully expand access to finance. That perspective changes the way emerging technologies are evaluated. Tokenization is interesting not simply because assets can be represented on a blockchain, but because new infrastructure may change who can access financial products, how cheaply those products can be delivered and which intermediaries are required along the way. The important question is not whether a technology is novel. It is whether it solves a real problem for people who are currently poorly served. Jan and Ivo explore the gap between the promise of open financial infrastructure and the realities of regulation, identity and compliance. Access to finance requires some way of establishing who a person is, while financial institutions and regulators still need systems capable of dealing with fraud, money laundering and financial crime. That creates a recurring tension between openness and permissionlessness on one side and the need for trusted financial relationships on the other. The conversation also looks at the architecture behind regulation itself. New technology often arrives faster than the legal categories designed to govern it. Regulators can respond by forcing new products into existing frameworks or by reconsidering which activities, risks and actors actually need to be regulated. For emerging markets in particular, getting that architecture right matters because regulation that is too expensive or complex can exclude exactly the users financial inclusion initiatives are supposed to reach. Open finance introduces another dimension. Giving individuals greater control over their financial data can increase competition and allow new providers to build services around customers who may previously have had little choice. But access to data alone does not guarantee inclusion. Infrastructure, incentives, consumer protection and viable business models still determine whether those services reach people who need them. Throughout the discussion, Ivo brings the conversation back to outcomes. Financial inclusion is not simply about giving somebody an account, a wallet or access to a new technology. The objective is for financial services to help people improve their lives and economic situation. That makes experimentation important, but it also makes evidence important. Technologies that appear transformative in the

2. 

   3 Sept 2026

   European Commission's Peter Kerstens | AI, Cyber Resilience, DORA Bank-Friendly Stablecoins and the MiCA Review

   MetaMarkets hosted by Jan Philipp Fritsche, co-founder of Bermuda, a compliant privacy solution. Strategic Director at Oak Security, a Web3 cybersecurity firm pioneering research on economic and systemic risks in decentralized systems. https://www.linkedin.com/in/janf/ The Guest Peter Kerstens, Adviser for Technological Innovation, Digital Transformation and Cybersecurity at the European Commission's Directorate-General for Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets Union. He led the Commission's Fintech Action Plan and Digital Finance Strategy. In Brussels he is known as the father of MiCA and DORA. https://www.linkedin.com/in/pkerstens/ In August, attackers spent days inside the Berlin state network and left with six terabytes of data. Internal documents, personal records and reportedly a file full of passwords. Their price for silence was 30 Bitcoin, about 2 million euros. Berlin refused to pay. Peter Kerstens has heard this story many times before, and he finds a ransom demand in Bitcoin a strange choice for anyone who wants to stay hidden. In his words, "who says that criminals are smart?" In this episode of MetaMarkets, Jan is joined by Peter Kerstens, the European Commission adviser behind both the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation and the Digital Operational Resilience Act. The conversation runs from cyber resilience and AI to the origin story of MiCA, the bank-friendly design of its stablecoin rules, the yield debate, DeFi and the MiCA consultation that is open until the end of September. Kerstens opens with a cybersecurity truism. There are two kinds of organizations, those that have been breached and those that will be. Five or six days of undetected access in Berlin is fast by the standards of the data. Average detection times run 60 to 80 days, and the median is often 180. That is why DORA treats resilience as a life cycle of prevention, detection, isolation, recovery and repair. He also explains why finance got its own rulebook while everyone else, including public administration, got NIS2. Finance is the most attacked sector, the most cyber mature one and the most harmonized in its supervision. Applying DORA standards across the whole economy would overwhelm most other sectors. For crypto there is a catch that many firms miss. Anyone covered by MiCA is also covered by DORA, and Kerstens keeps meeting firms that celebrate MiCA compliance and forget the DORA half. Protocols outside MiCA sit outside DORA too, and that is exactly where the bridge and smart contract exploits keep happening. His message to builders is that what you build "should not only be cool, it should also be secure." On AI, Kerstens is blunt. Attackers use the most capable models available and skip the question of authorization. Legitimate firms face restrictions. His personal view is that the best defense against an AI-enabled attack is AI, and that rules should never stop financial entities from using the best tools on the market. DORA already points in that direction. Jan pushes further and asks whether uncensored models should be legally available to everyone. Kerstens points to the AI Act and to geopolitics, since very few frontier models are built in Europe. He calls for serious European investment in models, compute and data centers, and he expects any attempt to shield European industry from foreign AI to fail. Then comes the origin story. Kerstens first heard of Bitcoin in 2017, was fascinated by the technology and watched the ICO wave raise venture-scale money through token sales. Much of it was fraudulent. Some of it was a new way to fund innovation. The framework that later became MiCA started in 2018 as an attempt to enable that, at a time when most policymakers saw only money laundering and speculation. Libra arrived in 2019 as the catalyst. A basket currency backed by a company with billions of users turned crypto from too small to care about into something impossible to ignore, and the G20 declared

3. 

   21 Aug 2026

   Maple Finance Co-Founder Sid Powell | The Future of Tokenization and Lending

   MetaMarkets hosted byJan Philipp Fritsche, co-founder of Bermuda, a compliant privacy solution. Strategic Director at Oak Security, a Web3 cybersecurity firm pioneering research on economic and systemic risks in decentralized systems. https://www.linkedin.com/in/janf/ The Guest Sid Powell — Co-founder and CEO of Maple Finance, one of the largest on-chain asset managers, with around $4.5B in AUM and roughly $22B in loans originated since launch. A former institutional banker from a securitization desk in Australia. In December, he declared "DeFi is dead." Since then, Maple's AUM is up 81%. So what actually died, and what's growing? In this episode of MetaMarkets, Jan is joined by Sid Powell of Maple Finance to unpack how institutional lending really works on-chain, and why it looks less like crypto and more like shadow banking. Sid's core distinction is that Maple isn't a bank. Banks take deposits and receive a government subsidy in the form of FDIC insurance, which is why they're so heavily regulated. Maple sits closer to the non-bank credit players like Ares, Apollo, and Blackstone: it doesn't take deposits; it takes investor funds and lends them out, primarily to trading firms and exchanges, with collateral backed by large-cap crypto like BTC, ETH, Solana, and XRP. That framing explains how Maple differs from the crypto-native lenders it's usually lumped in with. As Sid puts it, Aave and Morpho are really competing with each other to be infrastructure: algorithmic, smart-contract-based, minimal humans in the loop. Maple is vertically integrated, running its own vaults, pricing loans, setting credit limits, and handling margin calls and liquidations directly. Invoking Peter Thiel's "competition is for losers," Sid describes carving out a deliberate niche: institutional borrowers who can keep their collateral in triparty custody (Anchorage, BitGo, Zodia, Coinbase Custody) rather than wrapping it into a smart contract. That single design choice avoids the capital-gains event of wrapping, sidesteps smart-contract hack risk, and replaces the brutal 5% DeFi liquidation penalty with a "white-glove" margin call. On the "DeFi is dead" provocation, Sid is precise about what he means: what's died is the 2021-style model of niche products marketed with wallet connections, looped smart-contract risk, and token incentives. What's replacing it is the "DeFi mullet" — slick Web2 fintech UI at the front, DeFi rails at the back. His example is Robinhood's Earn program: the user just taps a button, while money flows into a Morpho vault, lending against credit assets like Maple's Syrup USDG. The on-chain advantages remain real: lending and liquidating at 2am on a Sunday, zero marginal cost to serve a client in Seoul or London or New York, and a head start on the two secular trends of stablecoin adoption and tokenized assets. The episode's sharpest exchange is on privacy. Where the previous guest from Optimism named privacy and compliance as the two biggest blockers to enterprise adoption, Sid takes the other side: privacy is an overstated problem he only ever hears from people building or invested in privacy-focused chains, never from an actual customer willing to accept lower yield or pay higher fees for it. Compliance, he agrees, matters, and he points to the Clarity Act as the thing genuinely holding institutions back from investing in tokens this year. Jan, building a compliant privacy tool himself, pushes back, and the two find the real dividing line: not privacy for its own sake, but compliant privacy. The conversation closes on how the KelpDAO exploit that saddled Aave with bad debt in April barely touched Maple (KYC'd borrowers, isolated protocol instances, collateral in qualified custody, positions unwound within 48 hours), the order in which institutions are actually arriving on-chain (trading firms, then shadow banks and private credit, now regular banks starting Bitcoin-backed lending), and why sluggish, compressing yield

Who has been a guest on Crypto Continental - The European lens on crypto, macro-finance, and regulation.

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Ulrich Bindseil
• Rhys Bidder
• Miguel Fernández Ordóñez
• Hana

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Spotify

5.0 / 5

3 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 24 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

35

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

32

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