TRM Talks

Australia just rolled out its biggest anti-money laundering reform in two decades — and it didn't just tighten existing rules, it more than doubled the number of businesses AUSTRAC regulates almost overnight, from roughly 19,000 to over 50,000, sweeping in lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, and dealers in precious metals and stones for the first time.

Brad Brown, AUSTRAC's National Manager for Regulatory Operations, joi...

In 1934, legal scholar Adolf Berle wrote a footnote speculating that someone might one day hold a passive property right in active property — what we'd now call a governance token. He called it a problem for another day. For Teresa Goody Guillén, founding partner of Bellamentis and founder of the legal AI platform Sophie Lex, that day is now, and it's reshaping how she advises clients building in digital markets.

Teresa joins ...

Juan Zarate joined the US Treasury just three weeks before September 11, 2001, and helped build the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI), transforming Treasury into a cornerstone of American national security. He later chronicled that evolution in Treasury’s War, the definitive account of how financial intelligence, sanctions, and economic power became central tools of US statecraft.

In this episode, Juan joins...

Criminals have no compliance officers and no regulators looking over their shoulder. That means their barrier to adopting new technology — including AI — is effectively zero. They don't need a tool to work for five years. They need it to work for the next five hours. Vatsa Narasimha, CEO of ComplyAdvantage, has been watching this asymmetry define the fraud landscape for years, and his answer is a platform built to match...

On this TRM Talks, Ari sits down with the team behind Unchained DEX in the City — three of the sharpest legal minds in crypto and three of his closest friends — for a wide-ranging conversation about the regulatory questions reshaping the industry in real time.

TuongVy Le, Jessi Brooks, and Katherine Kirkpatrick Bos bring their distinct backgrounds as prosecutors, general counsels, and enforcement attorneys to bear on wha...

If a sufficiently powerful quantum computer came online tomorrow, every token on every blockchain would be a target — Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana all share signature schemes that pre-date the post-quantum era. The math has been clear since the 1990s. What's been missing is the machine. That uncomfortable truth anchors this week's TRM Talks.

Brett Falk, research faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Crypto...

Brynly Llyr has deep roots in fintech and blockchain — in-house at eBay, PayPal, and Ripple, where she served as one of the first general counsels in crypto, then founding team at Celo, then Head of Blockchain and Digital Assets at the World Economic Forum. Now she’s Deputy Commissioner for Digital Financial Assets at the California DFPI, leading the rollout of the Digital Financial Assets Law, which goes live July 1, 2...

Behind every laundered transaction is a real victim, a real crime, and a real reason to do this work well. That conviction has shaped Sophie Bowler's entire career — from her first job working on the EU's Fourth Anti-Money Laundering Directive as an intern in Brussels, to her current role as Global Chief Risk and Compliance Officer at Zodia Custody.

In this conversation with Ari Redbord, Global Head of Policy at TRM Labs, Soph...

Catherine Gu has always been at the center of the shift toward the decentralization of money, a transformation that was once theoretical but is now actively reshaping global financial markets through stablecoins and on-chain infrastructure.

Inspired in part by Hayek’s vision of competing private forms of money, Catherine’s work sits at the intersection of that idea and its real-world implementation. As Head of Product fo...

When the Bitcoin white paper landed in 2008, most people saw a payment system. Shaul Kfir saw a privacy problem — because he had spent years working on the zero-knowledge proof technology that would eventually make private transactions possible on blockchains.

That instinct shaped everything that followed, including the Canton Network, the blockchain he co-founded that now moves trillions of dollars a month for some of the wor...

Crypto investigations are becoming a core part of modern policing. From ransomware and darknet markets to fraud and organized crime, digital assets increasingly appear in criminal investigations.

Det. Anoop “Snoop” Dattani of the Regional Organized Crime Unit at West Midlands Police joins Ari to discuss how investigators are adapting. Drawing on nearly two decades in policing and extensive cyber investigative experience,...

Chee Kin Lam, Head of Legal and Compliance at DBS Bank — one of the world's first major banks to receive a digital payment token license from the Monetary Authority of Singapore — joins Ari on this episode of TRM Talks.

Chee Kin shares a career spanning 30-plus years across JP Morgan, Standard Chartered, and DBS Bank, and what he learned along the way about people, culture, and getting things done across continents. He w...

Privacy and transparency sit at the heart of the digital asset ecosystem. As blockchain technology continues to reshape global finance, policymakers and builders face a critical question: How can financial systems preserve privacy while still protecting against illicit activity?

In this episode, Yaya Fanusie, Global Head of Policy at Aleo, join's Ari to explore the evolving intersection of privacy, national security, and blockch...

Romance and “investment” scams are not random. They are engineered — built on trust, pressure, and highly scripted manipulation. And while crypto is often the payment rail, the underlying crime is familiar: fraud that targets everyday people and drains life savings.

In this episode, Detective Matt Hogan of the Connecticut State Police and scam survivor Jackie Crenshaw join Ari to walk through how these schemes unfo...

Kah Kit Yip has spent his career turning bold ideas about the future of money into working infrastructure.

After nearly two decades at Malaysia’s central bank and leading breakthrough initiatives at the Bank for International Settlements, he helped pioneer new models for instant cross-border payments, programmable compliance, and faster, safer FX settlement. Now, as Head of Blockchain and Digital Assets at UOB, he’s brin...

From the Federal Reserve on 9/11 to Capitol Hill during the 2008 financial crisis, Adam Meinhardt’s career spans some of the most pivotal moments in economic policy. Now, as Head of Public Policy at Chainlink, he's helping shape crypto regulation during a historic legislative push.

In this episode, Adam joins Ari Redbord, Global Head of Policy at TRM Labs, to explore what it takes to engage policymakers, why market structure l...

Crypto law has matured quickly — and few people have been closer to that evolution than OG crypto lawyer Joshua Klayman. In this episode of TRM Talks, Joshua Klayman, US Head of Fintech and Head of Blockchain and Digital Assets at Linklaters, joins Ari for a wide-ranging conversation on how legal frameworks around digital assets, tokenization, and blockchain-based finance are taking shape in real time.

With nearly two decades...

What does the future of crypto look like in 2026? TRM’s global team weighs in.

In this special New Year’s edition, Ari is joined by TRM colleagues from around the world — investigators, compliance leaders, product strategists, and policy experts — to share their bold predictions for 2026.

Across the episode, TRM team members explore:

• The end of theory, and the beginning of execution
• How AI is accelerating fi...

2025 was the year of stablecoins — and there’s no better person to look back (and ahead) with than Dante Disparte of Circle.

In this Flash TRM Talks, Ari and Dante reflect on Circle’s big year, the passage of the GENIUS Act, shifting US market structure, and accelerating global regulatory alignment.

They also share predictions for 2026 — including why privacy and global coordination will define crypto’...