Money Moves Podcast: Meet the Future of Finance with Samantha Lewis, Ian Epstein, and David Sutter

66:32

S2 Ep 6 The Industry Is Growing up | How...

Money Moves Podcast: Meet the Future of Finance with... ·

2026/10/05

Support the show Money Moves is a weekly conversation about the technologies rebuilding the global financial system,from stablecoins and tokenized credit to prediction markets and generative AI. Samantha Lewis is a venture investor at Mercury Fund who sees a few thousand companies a year. Ian Epstein spent a decade running his own book as a senior portfolio manager at one of the best performing macro funds of its era, betting on where whole countries were going, and is now co-CEO of Profitr, ...

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57:02

S2 Ep5: The Vertical Era of AI | Why the Next AI...

Money Moves Podcast: Meet the Future of Finance with... ·

2026/09/28

Support the show Money Moves is a weekly conversation about the technologies rebuilding the global financial system,from stablecoins and tokenized credit to prediction markets and generative AI. Samantha Lewis is a venture investor at Mercury Fund who sees a few thousand companies a year. Ian Epstein spent a decade running his own book as a senior portfolio manager at one of the best performing macro funds of its era, betting on where whole countries were going, and is now co-CEO of Profitr, ...

en

53:46

S2 Ep4 : The Great Unwind |How the political climate...

Money Moves Podcast: Meet the Future of Finance with... ·

2026/09/23

Support the show Money Moves is a weekly conversation about the technologies rebuilding the global financial system,from stablecoins and tokenized credit to prediction markets and generative AI. Samantha Lewis is a venture investor at Mercury Fund who sees a few thousand companies a year. Ian Epstein spent a decade running his own book as a senior portfolio manager at one of the best performing macro funds of its era, betting on where whole countries were going, and is now co-CEO of Profitr, ...

en

41:11

S2 Ep3:The Hosts Behind the Money Moves Podcast|...

Money Moves Podcast: Meet the Future of Finance with... ·

2026/09/18

Money Moves is a weekly conversation about the technologies rebuilding the global financial system,from stablecoins and tokenized credit to prediction markets and generative AI. Samantha Lewis is a venture investor at Mercury Fund who sees a few thousand companies a year. Ian Epstein spent a decade running his own book as a senior portfolio manager at one of the best performing macro funds of its era, betting on where whole countries were going, and is now co-CEO of Profitr, building the mark...

en

46:59

S2 Ep2:The Hosts Behind the Money Moves Podcast|...

Money Moves Podcast: Meet the Future of Finance with... ·

2026/09/15

Money Moves is a weekly conversation about the technologies rebuilding the global financial system,from stablecoins and tokenized credit to prediction markets and generative AI.Samantha Lewis is a venture investor at Mercury Fund who sees a few thousand companies a year. Ian Epstein spent a decade running his own book as a senior portfolio manager at one of the best performing macro funds of its era, betting on where whole countries were going, and is now co-CEO of Profitr, building the market for

en

50:38

S2 Ep1: The Hosts Behind the Money Moves Podcast |...

Money Moves Podcast: Meet the Future of Finance with... ·

2026/09/10

Money Moves is a weekly conversation about the technologies rebuilding the global financial system,from stablecoins and tokenized credit to prediction markets and generative AI. Samantha Lewis is a venture investor at Mercury Fund who sees a few thousand companies a year. Ian Epstein spent a decade running his own book as a senior portfolio manager at one of the best performing macro funds of its era, betting on where whole countries were going, and is now co-CEO of Profitr, building the mark...

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01:08:53

Episode 11: Meet Your Host, Samantha Lewis

Money Moves Podcast: Meet the Future of Finance with... ·

2026/06/29

To wrap up Season 1, we're shaking our structure up. We’re releasing three Meet the Host episodes for you to get to know us beyond our hot takes on stablecoins, IPOs, and crypto markets.First up is our dynamite VC, Sam! Ian and Dave grill her for an hour on her path into venture, how she picks deals at Mercury Fund, and what separates the venture funds that survive a decade from the ones that don't.Sam grew up in a small town in New Mexico in a fifth-generation ranching family with two entrepreneur

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00:40:26

Episode 10: The First Real Test of Tokenized Equity

Money Moves Podcast: Meet the Future of Finance with... ·

2026/06/22

It flooded our newsfeeds. On Friday, June 12, SpaceX became the biggest IPO in history… $75B raised, ~$2T market cap, an instant top-ten US public company. On the same morning, crypto exchanges (Binance, Bybit, and others) had taken in roughly $557M in stablecoin orders from users who wanted exposure through tokenized SpaceX shares… and had to refund all of it, because their issuer couldn't get the IPO allocation. The kicker? By the end of that same week, the SpaceX perpetual futures contract was

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01:00:20

Episode 9: Is Crypto Still Relevant in the Age of AI?

Money Moves Podcast: Meet the Future of Finance with... ·

2026/06/16

The most crypto-friendly US administration in history is in place. Real use cases like stablecoins are scaling fast across the globe. The SEC has stopped trying to sue the industry out of existence… and yet crypto as an asset class is the lagging part of 2026's ripper market, with Bitcoin back to its August 2024 level (hovering below $63,000) and the major altcoins down a lot more.The week of the SpaceX IPO mania, we recorded Episode 09 of Money Moves and dug into this puzzle. In it, we cover where

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01:05:54

Episode 8: Capital Concentration - The $135B IPO...

Money Moves Podcast: Meet the Future of Finance with... ·

2026/06/08

Three IPOs, $135 billion, and everything elseThe largest IPO in history was Alibaba in 2014 at $22 billion. SpaceX alone wants to raise more than three times that this Thursday at a target valuation of $1.77 trillion… which would make it the seventh-largest US public company on day one! OpenAI and Anthropic are queued up behind it. There is roughly $135 billion in combined fresh stock the market has to absorb in a few months, across just three companies.The story of capital concentration is a major

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01:01:48

Episode 7: Permissioned vs. Permissionless: The...

Money Moves Podcast: Meet the Future of Finance with... ·

2026/05/25

Sam sets it up as a role-swap, with Dave (the permissioned business operator) arguing permissionless and Ian (the libertarian of the two) arguing permissioned. Dave opens with Marc Andreessen's 2014 New York Times op-ed (the original "declare a truth over the internet" framing) and uses it to argue that the only real innovation in a blockchain is solving one specific cryptography problem. Most of what gets called a blockchain today, he says, is doing nothing of the kind: ❝ A permissioned network of

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01:05:56

Episode 6: Stablecoin Business Models: Who Captures...

Money Moves Podcast: Meet the Future of Finance with... ·

2026/05/18

Why is Circle, a public US company that just IPO'd, racing to launch its own blockchain six months later? Dave makes the case that the headline reason (gas fees, agentic commerce) is third-order, and the first-order reason lands in five words.Who else is going to muscle into the issuance layer in the next twelve months? Anchorage is already dropping native USDC support so it can launch its own stablecoin. Coinbase is incentivizing non-USDC tokens despite being Circle's largest distribution partner

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01:22:28

Episode 5: To Tokenize or Not to Tokenize?

Money Moves Podcast: Meet the Future of Finance with... ·

2026/05/08

Two visions of tokenization (the practice of representing real-world assets) are competing in real time, and only one of them delivers on the $19 trillion forecast for the category.The walled-garden version, where every major bank tokenizes its own deposits inside its own four walls, mostly produces press releases because it dresses up an existing database with blockchain language. The permissionless version is the one where BlackRock's tokenized treasury fund (BUIDL) just landed on Uniswap, where

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01:07:59

Episode 4: DeFi - The Laboratory for the Future of...

Money Moves Podcast: Meet the Future of Finance with... ·

2026/04/27

In this episode of Money Moves, we delve into the complex world of decentralized finance (DeFi) and its intersection with traditional finance (TradFi). We explore recent events, including a $300 million hack, that highlight the vulnerabilities and risks within DeFi. Our discussion covers the tension between the instantaneous, permissionless nature of DeFi and the structured, regulated environment of TradFi. We examine how institutions like BlackRock are beginning to adopt blockchain technologies and

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01:20:49

Episode 3: The Power Shift - How Stablecoins Are...

Money Moves Podcast: Meet the Future of Finance with... ·

2026/04/23

The de-dollarization narrative is everywhere. BRICS alternatives, Gulf states rethinking their Treasury holdings, a digital yuan push from Beijing, sovereign gold-buying at multi-decade highs. So, is the dollar in trouble? In Episode 3, Samantha, Ian, and Dave take the debate on directly. Ian lays out the framework he uses to test every de-dollarization claim he hears, and systematically works through why the usual candidates don’t yet hold up.But the bigger surprise in this episode is the hidden

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01:04:50

Episode 2: From Crypto to Mainstream - How...

Money Moves Podcast: Meet the Future of Finance with... ·

2026/04/23

A stablecoin is a type of cryptocurrency designed to maintain a stable value by pegging it to a reserve asset, most commonly fiat currencies like the U.S. dollar. Unlike volatile cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, they provide price stability for transactions, trading, and remittances, often acting as a bridge between traditional money and digital assets. Stablecoins are being adopted at a rapid pace… globally. They routinely surpass Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, and Venmo in transaction volume, and now

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01:01:08

Episode 1: The Global Financial System is Getting an...

Money Moves Podcast: Meet the Future of Finance with... ·

2026/04/23

Money Moves is a new weekly show from Mercury Fund early-stage investor Samantha Lewis, built with two co-hosts she leads and invests behind: Ian Epstein, a former senior portfolio manager at Autonomy Capital (one of the world's best-performing macro funds in its era) and now co-CEO of Profiter, and Dave Sutter, a crypto operator since 2012, previously head of network strategy at Centre, the Coinbase + Circle joint venture that governs USDC, and now co-founder and CEO of OpenTrade.Eighteen months

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