The Smart Economy Podcast

Christian St. Louis, partner at Ethereal Ventures, joins The Smart Economy Podcast to discuss venture capital, crypto startup investing, AI-driven entrepreneurship, and the long-term future of blockchain adoption. St. Louis shares insights from evaluating hundreds of founders, explains why conviction and creativity matter more than ever in an AI-powered world, and explores how stablecoins, agentic commerce, and real-world adoption are quietly reshaping the crypto industry.

Anndy Lian, author of Web4: The Age of Autonomous Intelligence, joins The Smart Economy Podcast to discuss the convergence of AI and blockchain, why he believes Web3 never fully delivered on decentralization, and how autonomous AI systems could reshape digital ownership, governance, and online coordination. Lian shares insights from more than a decade in crypto, his work advising governments worldwide, and his vision for a more decentralized and intelligent internet.

Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol, joins The Smart Economy Podcast to discuss AI operating systems, agent harnesses, chain abstraction, and the growing role of AI agents in blockchain ecosystems. Polosukhin explains how NEAR’s original vision emerged from AI infrastructure challenges, why AI harnesses are evolving into operating systems, and how NEAR Intents enables users and agents to interact across blockchains without dealing with backend complexity. The conversation also explores

Alexis Sirkia, captain of Yellow, joins The Smart Economy Podcast to discuss how decentralized clearing and settlement infrastructure could reshape crypto trading, AI agent economies, and institutional adoption. Sirkia shares his journey from early market making to building Yellow, explains how state channels are designed to remove counterparty risk, and why AI agents may become crypto’s biggest real-world use case.

Vivek Raman, co-founder and CEO of Etherealize, joins The Smart Economy Podcast to discuss how Ethereum is moving from experimentation to real institutional use. Drawing on his time trading credit on Wall Street, Raman explains why banks are revisiting public blockchains, how tokenization is being implemented in practice, and why Ethereum’s structure continues to come up in those conversations.

Greg Osuri, founder of Akash Network and CEO of Overclock Labs, joins The Smart Economy Podcast to discuss decentralized cloud infrastructure, the growing demand for AI compute, and why traditional cloud providers may struggle to keep up. Osuri explains how Akash is building a peer-to-peer marketplace for compute, why GPU shortages are just the beginning, and how distributed systems could play a bigger role as AI adoption accelerates.