MoneyNeverSleeps

Brian McNulty has been building toward this moment for a decade. When he co-founded the Post Trade Distributed Ledger Group with the London Stock Exchange back in 2015, he was helping the industry imagine what tokenized funds might one day look like. On April 21st 2026, he rings the bell at that same exchange to launch DVF — Lingfeng Capital's Digital Venture Fund — and the circle closes.In this episode, Brian and Pete trace the journey from FAC to the Apex exit to DVF, and dig into what VC 3.0 actually means: a venture fund first, a tokenized structure second, built to fix the distribution problems that have kept private markets broken for decades.They cover why the underlying investment case always has to come first, how Archax and LSEG's Digital Markets Infrastructure underpin the model, what structured transferability actually looks like in practice, who DVF is really for, and the real hurdles the industry still has to clear.DVF is Lingfeng Capital's $100 million regulated tokenized venture fund investing in Series B through pre-IPO fintech, AI, blockchain, and digital infrastructure companies across global markets.Find Brian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianmcnulty/EP 116 — the original FAC episode from 2020: https://www.moneyneversleeps.ie/116-all-these-funds-brian-mcnulty-and-fac/CHAPTERS:00:00 Introduction00:45 From PTDL to Lingfeng — The Journey02:00 What FAC Got Right and Wrong03:15 Why Tokenization Alone Is Never Enough04:00 Private Markets Distribution Is Broken05:00 Venture Fund First, Token Second07:00 How DVF Works — LSEG, Archax and VC 3.009:00 Structured Transferability vs True Liquidity09:30 Who DVF Is For — Four Investor Buckets11:30 The Real Hurdles Left to Clear13:15 Ringing the Bell at the London Stock Exchange🌐 https://www.moneyneversleeps.ie/#MoneyNeverSleeps #VentureCapital #Tokenization #PrivateMarkets #DVF #VC30 #Fintech #Blockchain #DigitalAssets #LingfengCapital #Archax #LSEG

Who's watching the agent? That's the question at the heart of this episode — and it's one that's going to define the next decade of finance.
Rob Viglione spent his career figuring out how machines make decisions in high-stakes environments. From the US Air Force to Afghanistan, and now as Co-founder and CEO of Horizen Labs, he's building the cryptographic trust infrastructure for the agentic economy.
Every asset class will be tokenized. Agents will be trading 24/7 across all of them. Your data will be completely public. All the time. The guardrails don't exist yet — and the answer is Zero Knowledge Cryptography. The technology that lets agents prove they did what they were supposed to, without revealing how they did it.
Find Rob at horizenlabs.io and follow him on X at @robviglione
MoneyNeverSleeps is on YouTube: www.youtube.com/@moneyneversleeps1814And on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/moneyneversleeps/id1455819294
CHAPTERS:
00:00 Who's Watching the Agent?01:30 The Stakes of Agentic Commerce03:00 What Breaks When Agents Hit Financial Rails05:00 Is TradFi Infiltrating or Integrating with DeFi?07:30 Zero Knowledge Cryptography and Privacy on Public Rails09:30 Baking Privacy into the Protocol11:00 Is This ZK's Moment?
#MoneyNeverSleeps #ZeroKnowledge #AgenticEconomy #HorizenLabs #Crypto #Fintech #Web3 #Privacy #Tokenization #AI #Blockchain #ZKProofs

Talent is equally distributed. Opportunity is not. John Hill, VP of Story at Whop, has spent his career watching founders in Cape Town, Lagos, and Medellín build something real — and then hit a wall the moment they try to get paid. Whop is an AI-backed platform where anyone can build a digital business in minutes, and in February 2026 it closed a $200 million investment from Tether to embed stablecoin payments across 144 countries. The shift from finding a job to being the job is already happening. This is what the infrastructure behind it looks like.
We cover
What the wall actually looks like for a founder in Lagos, Cape Town, or Medellín
Why talent is equally distributed but opportunity is not
How Whop has removed the barriers that once kept entrepreneurship out of reach
What Tether's $200M investment means for creators and builders outside the western financial system
The shift from finding a job to being the job
Why the Boston Irish diaspora is the original first dollar entrepreneur story
How two students turned one skill into $140,000 a year — while still in school
For full show notes and guest links visit moneyneversleeps.ie
🌐 https://www.moneyneversleeps.ie/
MoneyNeverSleeps explores one big idea each week in under 15 minutes with founders, operators, and investors shaping crypto, fintech, AI, and onchain finance.
Subscribe and join the conversation.
#Entrepreneurship #FutureOfWork #Tether

Markets don't close when the exchange does. They just move somewhere else.
In this episode of MoneyNeverSleeps, Pete Townsend speaks with Alex Pollak of 21Shares about why crypto ETPs are not just surviving the rise of onchain finance — they're about to become part of it.
Alex Pollak is Managing Director and Head of UK and New Markets at 21Shares, which provides the largest suite of cryptocurrency exchange-traded products in the world. Drawing on over 20 years in the ETF and ETP industry, Alex explains why the wrapper that made crypto accessible to institutions is now evolving into something programmable, tokenized, and potentially tradeable around the clock.
Across crypto, fintech, and traditional finance, the conversation around tokenized assets and 24/7 markets is moving from theory toward product reality. Exchanges, brokers, and issuers are beginning to ask what happens when the underlying assets never sleep but the fund structure still does.
Rather than being displaced by direct crypto ownership or onchain alternatives, ETPs may be about to get smarter — evolving from simple access vehicles into programmable baskets that operate inside a financial system that no longer has opening hours.
This isn't a crypto-versus-TradFi conversation. It's a discussion about financial infrastructure, total cost of ownership, and how one of the most successful product innovations in market history is quietly reinventing itself.
We cover
Why buying crypto directly isn't always cheaper than using an ETP
How total cost of ownership changes the calculation for institutional investors
Why basket products are the next frontier — and what's holding them back
How regulators in the US, UK, and Europe are shaping the pace of innovation
Why 21Shares wants to tokenize its own ETPs
What a 24/7 tradeable ETP actually looks like in practice
Why the long runway for crypto ETPs is just beginning
Alex brings a perspective shaped by two decades of watching skepticism turn into a multi-trillion dollar industry — and sees the same pattern emerging in crypto ETPs today.
If you're a founder, operator, or investor trying to understand how traditional financial products and onchain systems are beginning to converge, this episode offers a clear-eyed view of where things are heading.
00:00 Markets never close: the cold open
00:30 Intro and guest welcome
01:00 How investors access crypto today
02:30 ETPs vs direct ownership: who uses what
03:30 Total cost of ownership and the spread argument
04:30 How ETP spreads have tightened over time
05:00 From single asset to basket products
06:00 What regulators in the UK, US and Europe are allowing
07:00 The dream: funds as smart contracts
08:00 Tokenizing ETPs and the 24/7 market problem
09:30 Technology ahead of regulation
10:30 The long runway for crypto ETPs
11:00 Closing thoughts and where to find 21Shares
For full show notes and guest links, see below.
MoneyNeverSleeps explores one big idea each week in under 15 minutes with founders, operators, and investors shaping crypto, fintech, AI, and onchain finance.
If you're interested in where financial infrastructure is heading — from tokenized assets and crypto ETPs to programmable markets and onchain settlement — subscribe and join the conversation.
🌐 https://www.moneyneversleeps.ie/
#CryptoETPs #TokenizedAssets #OnchainFinance

DeFi transparency means every onchain trade is visible.
Which means the moment a strategy works, the market can copy it.
In this episode of MoneyNeverSleeps, Pete Townsend speaks with Matteo Manzi, co-founder and CEO of Orion Finance, about a structural challenge emerging in onchain asset management: the same transparency that makes blockchain markets verifiable can also expose the intellectual property behind trading strategies.
Matteo describes this tension with a simple phrase: “transparency equals liability.” If every transaction is visible in real time, sophisticated traders — or automated smart contracts — can monitor strategies and replicate trades almost instantly.
Orion Finance is building infrastructure designed to address this problem. The idea draws inspiration from the multi-pod hedge fund model used by firms like Millennium, where multiple trading teams run independent strategies while sharing capital, infrastructure, and execution efficiency.
Matteo calls this concept “Millennium onchain.”
Instead of isolated vaults competing in the open, Orion’s architecture allows strategies to operate within a shared system where trades can be netted internally, capital can be allocated across strategies, and execution costs can be reduced — all while preserving the confidentiality of the underlying trading logic.
Across crypto and traditional finance, the conversation around onchain asset management is beginning to shift from simple tokenized products toward actively managed strategies, capital aggregation platforms, and composable financial infrastructure.
If transparency allows markets to verify what is happening, privacy may be required to make those markets investable.
We cover
• Why transparency can become a liability for trading strategies
• How onchain vault strategies can be copied in real time
• What Matteo means by “Millennium onchain”
• How multi-strategy capital platforms could emerge in DeFi
• Why internal trade crossing and netting improve capital efficiency
• How composable vaults could reshape investment products
Matteo brings a builder’s perspective shaped by designing infrastructure for onchain portfolio management, explaining how privacy, verifiability, and capital efficiency can coexist in the next generation of financial markets.
If you’re a founder, operator, or investor trying to understand how professional asset management may evolve onchain, this episode explores one possible path forward.
⏱️ Chapters
00:00 — Cold open: strategies get copied
00:28 — “Transparency equals liability”
02:40 — Why DeFi strategies leak alpha
04:05 — Orion’s multi-pod architecture
07:05 — “Millennium onchain” explained
10:30 — Composable vault strategies
12:45 — The future of DeFi asset management
For full show notes and guest links, see below.
MoneyNeverSleeps explores one big idea each week in under 15 minutes with founders, operators, and investors shaping crypto, fintech, AI, and onchain finance.
If you're interested in where financial infrastructure is heading — from stablecoins and tokenised assets to AI-driven markets — subscribe and join the conversation.
🌐 https://www.moneyneversleeps.ie/
#DeFi #OnchainFinance #CryptoMarkets