Everyone in crypto is chasing TPS. Eunice Giarta thinks that's the wrong race entirely.

As co-founder of Monad Foundation, she spent four years building what she calls the Ethereum of high-performance blockchains, a chain with validators on six continents that doesn't sacrifice decentralization for speed.

In this episode of Endgame, Amanda Cassatt sits down with Eunice to break down what actually makes a blockchain worth building on in 2026, what the real killer use case for Monad looks like, and why bear markets build better products than bull markets. But the most unexpected part isn't the tech, it's the path. Eunice went from Merrill Lynch to Shutterstock to a pastry kitchen at Jean-Georges in New York. A Pi Day pandemic layoff sent her down the crypto rabbit hole.

Four years later, she co-founded one of the most talked-about L1s in the space.

What you'll take away:

- Why TPS is a misleading and gameable metric

- How Monad achieves real decentralization across 6 continents

- The use case that truly requires Monad's architecture

- How to measure genuine product market fit in crypto

- Why bear markets produce better products than bull runs

- What AI agents actually need from blockchain infrastructure

- The most unexpected founder story in crypto right now

“A lot of users don’t need a bank. What they need is a wallet.”

In this episode of Endgame, Amanda Cassatt sits down with Richard Teng, CEO of Binance, for a conversation about what crypto actually became and whether that’s the right thing. Richard spent three decades in traditional finance, including the Central Bank of Singapore, before joining Binance in 2021. He doesn’t argue like a convert. He argues like someone who watched the old system fail for thirty years and decided the new one had to work differently.

They start at the founding question: is crypto self-sovereign freedom tech or licensed infrastructure run by a handful of platforms? Richard’s answer is that the frame is wrong. Centralized exchanges aren’t a betrayal of the movement. They’re the interface the movement needs to reach the 1.4 billion people the financial system never bothered to serve. From there they move through Binance’s regulatory strategy in markets like Dubai, why the Genius Act sent stablecoin volume past Visa in under a year, and why regulatory clarity is the unlock for institutional capital, not just compliance overhead.

Amanda pushes on financialization risk, tokenization of ownership, and whether crypto has run out of native narrative. Richard’s case for the SAFU fund, recovering assets sent to wrong chains, and what a financial super app means in frontier markets is the clearest argument for why centralization isn’t just commercially convenient but structurally necessary for the thing to work at all.

Timestamps:

00:00 - Is crypto still freedom tech or licensed infra?

00:55 - 1.4 billion unbanked: why the system fails them

03:00 - Why 65% quit after their first onchain transaction

05:04 - What a bank actually does and what replaces it

07:30 - Binance as a financial super app for the excluded

09:30 - Binance does more for inclusion than governments

11:02 - China, protectionism and why countries need Binance

13:52 - The Dubai story: building a crypto hub from scratch

17:09 - Regulation as a moat vs regulation as a product

19:32 - The Genius Act and the stablecoin explosion

21:37 - Is compliance becoming incumbent protection?

24:39 - Binance's approach to the US market

26:29 - AI + Blockchain will rebuild every industry

28:42 - Will AI suck all trading value to the biggest firm?

33:11 - Binance AI Pro: what it actually does

36:46 - Crypto out of ideas? RWAs and the next narrative

39:14 - Why 24/7 trading changes everything

41:38 - Invisible crypto and the abstraction risk

45:58 - Hyperliquid vs Binance: who wins?

48:47 - Where does Binance's growth actually come from?

50:00 - The future: wallets replace banks

52:16 - The SAFU fund: $1B to protect users

54:23 - Crypto's real legacy: financial education

56:00 - Do banks really create money from a spreadsheet?

Stay Connected

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Links to Follow:

Endgame on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/45B9szUxVXEwfCDA6uRxwq?si=HT9XXqF9Q2CcM9hfLbmkVg

Endgame on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/endgame-with-amanda-cassatt/id1801809440

Follow Richard

https://www.instagram.com/tengrich/

https://x.com/_RichardTeng

“The block explorer is your x-ray machine. Open it up, and you find rooms full of people.”

In this episode of Endgame, Amanda Cassatt sits down with Austin Federa, former Head of Strategy at Solana and co-founder of DoubleZero, for a rare, candid conversation shaped by shared history on opposite sides of the Ethereum–Solana divide.

They unpack the real meaning of decentralization: is it a philosophy, a design choice, or just branding? The discussion moves from the Drift hack—revealing how a months-long social engineering attack exposed crypto’s underlying security culture—to broader questions about trust, control, and the human systems beneath supposedly autonomous technology.

Along the way, they explore financial nihilism, the psychological impact of the internet on risk-taking, and whether blockchains should stand for anything beyond speed and efficiency. What happens to values like openness and censorship resistance once real money enters the system? And who carries the ideology when institutions drift from it?

Timestamps:

00:00 Crypto values and philosophy

03:07 Speed and the evolution of blockchain design

06:05 Decentralization vs. centralization

08:58 Solana’s practical approach

11:48 FTX and Solana’s resilience

15:03 The role of decentralization in finance

17:58 Meme coins and perceived value

20:58 Financial nihilism and Gen Z

30:15 The psychology of comparison online

34:34 Roots of financial nihilism

37:41 What money actually is

41:21 The Drift hack and crypto security culture

53:00 Building the future: DoubleZero

Stay Connected:

Subscribe to Endgame: https://www.youtube.com/@endgamepodcast

Amanda on X: https://x.com/amandacassatt

Serotonin on X: https://x.com/serotonin_hq

Austin on X: http://x.com/Austin_Federa

DoubleZero on X: https://x.com/doublezero

Links to Follow:

Endgame on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/45B9szUxVXEwfCDA6uRxwq?si=HT9XXqF9Q2CcM9hfLbmkVg

Endgame on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/endgame-with-amanda-cassatt/id1801809440