Crypto Is Interested in You with Molly White and Tonantzin Carmona

You may not be interested in crypto, but crypto is interested in you.

Cryptocurrency has stopped being a finance story. In 2026 it's a political-money machine - woven into our elections, our regulators, the President's family balance sheet, and the everyday plumbing of how Americans get paid, borrow, and save. You can decide never to buy a single token and still be exposed to the fallout.

To open Season 4, Dave Troy talks with two of the sharpest people on this beat: independent researcher Molly White, who tracks the industry transaction by transaction, and Brookings fellow Tonantzin Carmona, who maps the structural harm - who gets targeted, who gets hurt, and how policy makes it possible.

A plain-English tour of where crypto stands heading into the 2026 and 2028 elections: the collapse of regulatory enforcement; the Trump family's crypto web (World Liberty Financial, the USD1 stablecoin, memecoins, Trump Media); the GENIUS Act that passed and the CLARITY Act the industry wants next; the super PACs that spent $130M in 2024; and the quiet creep of crypto into mortgages, 401(k)s, and checkout pages. Plus wildcat banking, predatory inclusion, the death of Web3, the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, the Celsius collapse, and the case for treating our financial system as a choice, not an inevitability.

Guests

Molly White - writer and researcher; Citation Needed, Web3 Is Going Just Great, and the election-money tracker Follow the Crypto.

Tonantzin Carmona - fellow at the Brookings Institution; writes on wealth, inequality, and how crypto is marketed to and harms minority communities ("predatory inclusion"). TEDxMidAtlantic talk forthcoming.

Tonantzin Carmona at Brookings Institution: https://www.brookings.edu/people/tonantzin-carmona/

Chapters

00:00 - Cold open & intro

01:44 - Meet Molly White & Tonantzin Carmona

06:42 - Regulatory capture: the SEC's 180

09:09 - The $130M lobby; the GENIUS & CLARITY Acts

11:26 - Money out of politics: the Illinois primary

14:29 - The Trump crypto web - and buying influence

19:48 - Stablecoins explained; dollar dominance

24:08 - Tether, audits, "Amazon bucks" & deposit flight

28:04 - Wildcat banking: financial history in reverse

29:03 - Young men, speculation & predatory inclusion

33:19 - Whatever happened to Web3?

37:52 - The Strategic Bitcoin Reserve & "End the Fed"

48:38 - Crypto creeps in: mortgages, 401(k)s, mines

50:50 - The crypto playbook becomes the AI playbook

53:17 - Payments rails: Stripe, Block, "boiling the frog"

56:29 - When it looks like a bank but isn't: Celsius

59:24 - A public alternative: FedNow & Brazil's PIX

01:01:09 - The CBDC question

01:04:27 - What you can actually do

01:08:38 - Outro & links

Dave Troy Presents is published by America 2.0. More at america2.news.

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