You Can Move Millions Without a Bank

Welcome back to Talking Tokens.

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The latest Talking Tokens podcast 🎙️

For this week’s Tuesday episode, I interviewed Tomer Weller, Chief Product Officer at the Stellar Development Foundation.

We discuss Stellar’s evolution over the past 11 years, why it chose to stay mission-aligned while others chased hype, and how it’s enabling native crypto-to-cash flows, seamless DeFi access, and developer-friendly smart contracts with Soroban. Tomer also shares his take on Web3 product design, the future of privacy, and what it takes to earn institutional trust.

TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 – Intro
1:01 – Tomer’s background & joining Stellar
2:33 – How Stellar has evolved over the years
5:18 – Cross-border payments & MoneyGram integration
8:06 – UX: Making crypto invisible to users
11:46 – What makes a bad Web3 product
13:16 – Why security needs to come first
15:02 – Soroban & Stellar’s smart contracts vision
20:27 – Governance, validators & institutional trust
26:28 – Why developers choose to build on Stellar
27:32 – DeFi + RWAs: New frontier for tokenization
30:02 – What institutions want next: Privacy

Talking Tokens episodes are released on Spotify and Apple Podcasts at 6AM EST or YouTube at 8AM EST every Tuesday and Thursday. Listen in!

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Money and people moves

1. Suzanne Dannheim joins Inversion Capital as COO

2. Summer Mersinger announces she’s the new CEO of Blockchain Association

3. Morph CEO Cecilia Hsueh plans to step down 

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