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Guy Young’s Bet on the ‘Familiar’ Crypto App That Could Reach 100 Million Users
In this episode of When Shift Happens, I sit down with Guy Young, founder and CEO of Ethena Labs, to discuss how Ethena grew from zero to billions of dollars in under two years, what that experience taught him about building in crypto, and why he now believes one of the industry’s biggest opportunities is surprisingly simple: a dollar that earns yield, inside an app anyone can use. The vision behind EthenaPay is not to convince millions of people to become crypto users. It is

Kevin Follonier
Sep 95 min read


Why Evan Cheng Believes Most Blockchains Were Built on the Wrong Architecture, and What Sui Does Differently
In this episode of When Shift Happens, I sit down with Evan Cheng to discuss why he believes the architecture behind most major blockchains is fundamentally insufficient, what Sui was built to solve instead, and how the next wave of adoption may come. What makes the conversation especially interesting is that Evan is not simply arguing that Sui is faster or cheaper. He is making a deeper claim: that much of crypto is still built on a mental model of assets and ledgers that wo

Kevin Follonier
Mar 114 min read


Inside Meteora: Building Solana’s $100M Internet Capital Market Engine
In this episode of When Shift Happens , I sit down with Zen and Soju to discuss how a 20-person team built Solana’s most advanced liquidity engine, why “Internet Capital Markets” are the next frontier, and what it really takes to launch culture-shaping tokens without losing the plot. Meteora didn’t begin as today’s sleek “liquidity layer”. Its roots trace back to Mercurial, a 2021-era Solana project that launched during the FTX boom. Zen, a product-first operator with a knack

Kevin Follonier
Oct 29, 20255 min read


Inside Arthur Hayes’ Bitcoin Thesis: Liquidity, Cycles, and the Road to $1M
In this episode of When Shift Happens , I sit down with Arthur Hayes to discuss why he keeps most of his wealth in Bitcoin, his framework for turning “shitcoins” into more BTC, the stablecoin meta he thinks will reshape finance, and the human routines like skiing, tennis, and discipline that anchor his risk-taking. The Bitcoin Standard Hayes is the CIO of Maelstrom, co-founder and former CEO of BitMEX, and the inventor of the perpetual swap. Across an hour of fast exchanges

Kevin Follonier
Oct 15, 20254 min read
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