"You Can Wake Up With an Idea for a Fund and Deploy it in Minutes:" Melon's Mona El Isa

"You Can Wake Up With an Idea for a Fund and Deploy it in Minutes:" Melon's Mona El Isa

This weeks podcast episode is with Mona El Isa, the co-founder of Melon, a decentralized asset management protocol. Mona tells the story of how she started her career at Goldman Sachs trading equities, derivatives, and all kinds of financial instruments, for a decade. She then went to work with one of Goldman’s hedge fund clients, where she managed a long-short portfolio. With all that experience and $20 million dollars from a seed investor, she ventured on her own to launch a hedge fund —but failed. The time, costs and administrative hassle were too much to handle even with an investment of millions, which in that world, is actually pretty tiny. She came to the conclusion that the next step for her would be to build a blockchain-based protocol so that nobody would have to experience what she did when trying to set up an investment fund. A platform that made the process so much cheaper, faster and easier, that anybody could become a hedge fund manager. That’s how Melon Protocol came about.

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Rebuilding Global Payments with Stablecoins | Circle & USDC with Nikhil Chandhok

Rebuilding Global Payments with Stablecoins | Circle & USDC with Nikhil Chandhok

Stablecoins have quietly become the most successful use case in crypto.In this episode, Nikhil Chandhok, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Circle, explains why USDC is more than a digital dollar —...

6 Helmi 45min

Crypto’s Point of No Return: Institutions are Finally Here, with Brett Tejpaul

Crypto’s Point of No Return: Institutions are Finally Here, with Brett Tejpaul

2025 marked a turning point for crypto.In this episode, Brett Tejpaul, head of Coinbase Institutional, sits down with Camila Russo to explain why institutional adoption accelerated last year. From ETF...

4 Helmi 49min

Why OG DeFi Failed | Kain Warwick, Founder of Synthetix

Why OG DeFi Failed | Kain Warwick, Founder of Synthetix

Kain Warwick—DeFi OG and founder of Synthetix and Infinex—is back on The Defiant Podcast with Camila Russo for a no-BS conversation at a pivotal moment: Infinex just ran its INX token sale and is head...

30 Tammi 54min

Ethereum is for Institutions: Danny Ryan Says Tokenization Isn't Enough

Ethereum is for Institutions: Danny Ryan Says Tokenization Isn't Enough

In this interview, Camila Russo sits down with Danny Ryan — former Ethereum Foundation researcher and a key leader behind Ethereum’s shift to proof of stake — now Co-Founder & President at Etherealize...

29 Tammi 26min

How Stablecoins Are Rewiring Global Payments | Borderless CPO Alex Garn

How Stablecoins Are Rewiring Global Payments | Borderless CPO Alex Garn

In this episode of The Defiant Podcast, Chris Storaker sits down with Alex Garn, Chief Product Officer at Borderless, to unpack how stablecoins are quietly transforming cross-border payments — and wha...

9 Tammi 25min

The Rise of the Fan Economy | Consumer Crypto | Avalanche Ecosystems Ep. 4

The Rise of the Fan Economy | Consumer Crypto | Avalanche Ecosystems Ep. 4

For consumer crypto to thrive it needs to embrace financialization to deliver a better experience, and maker sure crypto disappears everywhere else. Projects doing this right sit in an emerging sector...

5 Tammi 18min

Uniswap is about to “turn on the switch.” with Hayden Adams

Uniswap is about to “turn on the switch.” with Hayden Adams

In this episode of The Defiant Podcast, Uniswap founder Hayden Adams joins us right as the UNIfication (Unification) proposal has moved to a final governance vote—a sweeping plan from Uniswap Labs + t...

22 Joulu 20251h 8min

Ethereum’s “HTTP Moment” with Marissa Posner & Yoav Weiss

Ethereum’s “HTTP Moment” with Marissa Posner & Yoav Weiss

In this episode of The Defiant podcast, Camila Russo sits down in Buenos Aires (Devconnect) with Marissa Foster (Product, Ethereum Foundation) and Yoav Weiss (security researcher, Ethereum Foundation)...

19 Joulu 202540min