I was the last person anyone expected to end up here.
I built an entire career on being careful. The lawyer who reads the footnotes and the fine print. The tenured professor who taught other people to read the footnotes and the fine print. And an intellectual property expert who deeply values both intellect and property. So, when crypto first showed up, I did exactly what a skeptical lawyer is trained to do: to question it, view it skeptically, and compare it to the standard, the almighty dollar. Based on that view, I dismissed it and wrote it off as “magic internet money for criminals”, nothing I wanted anything to do with.
Then in 2017, I read an academic paper that explored how blockchain, the process used to time stamp, verify, secure and trace bitcoin payments, could be used to solve for some of copyright’s most challenging questions of ownership tracing, I actually looked, not at the hype or the price charts, but at the technology and the problem it was trying to solve, as described in a short paper written by bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Once I saw it, I could not unsee it.
That moment took me from a law professor’s office to testifying before Congress to leading a global regulatory advisory firm to advising central banks, regulatory bodies and compliance experts on how to regulate and manage the very thing I almost wrote off. It is also why my SiriusXM podcast (available widely) relaunches today as “Confidently Crypto & More!”.
Unpopular (or, perhaps, underappreciated) opinion: the villain in this story is not crypto. It is a financial system that was never built to be clear or fair to most people. The Freedman’s Bank collapsed in 1874 and took the savings of tens of thousands of Black depositors with it. Greenwood, the Tulsa district we remember as Black Wall Street, held more than 600 thriving Black-owned businesses at its peak, banks, schools, theaters, hospitals, and was burned to the ground in the 1921 massacre. Redlining wrote racial exclusion into the mortgage market for generations. The 2008 crash stripped Black household wealth at a rate the rest of the country did not experience and has never fully acknowledged. Crypto walked into a story that was already being written, and it got cast as the bad guy because it is new and it is loud.
Greenwood also left a lesson that took me years to fully absorb: wealth concentrated in one place, held inside systems controlled by people hostile to your success, can be targeted and destroyed. That is why I advocate so strongly for the move from Black Wall Street to Black Web Street. The digital economy offers something Greenwood never had: wealth that is distributed, borderless and resilient by design.
You cannot burn down a network.
That is the Web3 economy in plain terms: the layer of the internet where you can actually own and control what is yours. Your money, your data, your creative work, without a bank or a platform holding it for you and taking a cut. Bitcoin started it as a way to move value from person to person (aka, peer-to-peer). What has grown up around it is a full financial layer of digital assets that use cryptography and other technology to encrypt them, of stablecoins, tokenized assets and decentralized applications (dApps), mirroring a Kwanzaa principle, Ujamaa, cooperative economics; that is, wealth built and held together rather than gated by intermediaries.
The receipts are real. The global crypto market sits at roughly $2.2 trillion as of this writing, per CoinMarketCap. Stablecoins, digital dollars in circulation, account for roughly $300 billion of it. According to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, Sub-Saharan Africa received more than $205 billion in on-chain value in the year to June 2025, a 52% increase, with Nigeria alone receiving $92.1 billion and ranking sixth in the world for grassroots adoption. Stablecoins make up 43% of the region’s transaction volume, and BVNK’s 2026 Stablecoin Utility Report found that 79% of crypto-active users in Africa hold them, the highest rate of any region in the world.
Those numbers describe utility, not gambling. Sending money to Sub-Saharan Africa still costs an average of 8.8 percent of the amount sent, per World Bank data, nearly triple the UN’s own target and the most expensive receiving corridor on earth. A creator earning $1,000 from a global platform loses close to $90 just accessing her own income. That is not a fee. It is a barrier, and stablecoin rails are cutting costs on those corridors by 60 to 70 percent. People are protecting savings from currencies losing value and moving money the traditional system made slow, expensive, or impossible to move. Fundamentals, not a get-rich-quick scheme.
The show adds “& More” because the story has outgrown crypto alone. Neil deGrasse Tyson devoted a recent StarTalk episode to federal cuts to science funding and the researchers leaving this country as support for their work disappears, an intellectual vacuum descending on the United States, in his framing. His subject was science budgets. Mine is what that drain does to a bargain written into the Constitution itself.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 gives Congress the power “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Create something new, and the law protects your right to profit from it for a limited period of time. When that window closes, the work belongs to everyone and fuels advancements and progress for the next generation to continue to build on. That is the entire engine of American innovation in one sentence, and it rests on a single assumption: a human being on the other end, thinking, imagining, inventing. Fund those humans out of the country while AI generates writing and discoveries with no human author behind them, and the incentive structure at the heart of that clause starts pointing at no one. Information used to be the scarce resource. Now it is everywhere, cheap and instant. The scarce resources now are the intelligence to use it well and the conditions that let that intelligence stay and build here.
Money, data, creative work, invention. Every one of those threads runs through the same question of ownership, which is why I ask the same question of every system I analyze: built for whom? The show grew to match that question. Same voice, same commitment to clarity, a wider lens across crypto, AI, intellectual property and the Web3 infrastructure underneath it all.
The old gatekeepers to wealth in this country were capital, connections, and who your people knew. Those walls are eroding in this new economy. The one still standing is information, and it is the first gate in American history that opens from the inside.
The people quietly building advantage with these tools right now are not smarter than anyone else. They got informed first. Confusion about money, crypto, AI, or any of it is not a personal failing; it is the predictable product of a system that was never built to explain itself. But it is also the only barrier left with a remedy entirely in our own hands.
A century after Greenwood, that may be the most radical fact in the next chapter of this entire story.
