Shows
Signaling TheoryShellmates: Tinder for Bots /w Dan Pollmann and Gerrit HallCrypto’s melting down, so Rex sits down with Dan and Gerrit for AI Tools: Round Three—a conversation about what’s actually changing in day-to-day work when models ship, agents run in parallel, and “sessions” start to feel like a lifestyle. They react to a big model-release day (Opus 4.6 + ChatGPT 5.3), compare Claude Code vs Codex for real coding work, and unpack why Claude feels so sticky: better UX, more glazing, and a dopamine-loop quality that’s hard to ignore once you notice it. From there it gets practical: managing context windows with dashboards and handoff files...
2026-02-1251 min
Signaling TheoryBuilding with Agents Part 2 w/ Gerrit Hall & Dan PollmannAre we building useful developer tools—or just feeding an addiction?In the second episode of our AI tools series, Rex, Dan, and Garrett dig into the internal systems they've built around Claude Code: markdown session logs, pre-commit hooks, context management strategies, and notification hubs. Dan shares war stories from running AI on helicopters inspecting power lines (including the time an agent changed his root password without asking). Garrett walks through his approach to scaling ten concurrent projects. And Rex asks the uncomfortable question: is all this meta-tooling actually helping, or are we just tinkering because it fe...
2026-02-0558 min
Signaling TheoryBuilding with Agents w/ Gerrit Hall & Taylor SavageRex digs into how AI coding agents are changing the way real teams build software. Taylor Savage and Gerrit Hall share the workflows, tools, and guardrails that actually work: from custom IDEs and inbox-driven agents to multi-pass code reviews, collaboration at “agent speed,” testing that matters, and keeping data safe. A grounded look at what to automate, what to supervise, and how to ship faster without losing the plot.
2026-01-2957 min
Signaling TheoryA Conversation with a Crypto-Skeptic w/ Taylor SavageRex brings on his longtime friend Taylor Savage — a lifelong “techie” turned software engineer and product manager — for a candid, outside-the-crypto-bubble conversation about what crypto actually looks like from the broader tech world. From an early Bitcoin birthday gift (and an early sale…) to the last decade of fraud “speed-runs,” they debate irreversibility, regulation, institutional adoption, and whether crypto’s real promise is narrow-but-real or mostly drowned out by hype and extraction.
2026-01-2258 min
Signaling TheoryReject Nihilism, Build Solutions w/ Sam McCulloch (USD.AI)Rex sits down with Sam McCulloch (Growth Lead at USD.ai, formerly Leviathan News and Flywheel DeFi) to talk about what crypto’s been optimizing for—and what it should optimize for next. Sam argues the last couple of cycles rewarded extractive “attention finance” (meme coins, short-horizon speculation), and that the industry needs to reclaim a more constructive narrative: build real products, connect to real-world balance sheets, and make the rails useful outside of crypto itself. In the back half, they go deep on USD.ai’s thesis: bringing DeFi-style, programmatic lending to GPU infrastructure. Sam walks through how...
2026-01-151h 15
Signaling TheoryA Masterclass in Based Rollups w/ Jason Vranek (Fabric)Based rollups have been floating around Ethereum discourse for a couple years now, but the concept remains confusing even to people who understand rollups generally. The pitch sounds almost contradictory: use Ethereum's decentralized validator set to sequence rollups, but somehow still get the fast, smooth UX of centralized sequencers like Base or Arbitrum.Jason Vranek works on Fabric, building the infrastructure to make based rollups actually work. In this episode, he walks through the architecture piece by piece: what "based sequencing" actually means, why the original "total anarchy" designs had terrible UX, and how pre-confirmations and gateways...
2026-01-081h 03
Signaling TheoryCrypto Tools for Real People w/ Russell Castagnaro & Gardner Loulan (My Unicorn Account)Crypto has a user experience problem—and it's not just about complexity. Every phishing link, every airdropped scam token, every "is this email real?" moment is friction that keeps normal people out. Meanwhile, the industry keeps iterating on DeFi protocols while the debit card market sits there, largely untouched.Russell Castagnaro and Gardner are building Unicorn, a B2B2C platform that lets brands create complete Web3 experiences—onboarding, wallets, approved dApps—without exposing users to the chaos of the open blockchain. Think of it like the difference between AOL's curated internet and the raw Netscape browser: same u...
2026-01-011h 05
Signaling TheoryBuilding a DeFi-Native Chain w/ Justin Havins (Katana)What does it actually mean to build a chain around DeFi—not just host DeFi apps, but bake decentralized finance into the architecture itself?Justin Havins spent 13 years in traditional banking before joining Polygon's DeFi team, and now he's helping lead Katana, a new L2 that's trying something different: sharing chain revenue directly with users who put their assets to work in DeFi protocols.In this conversation, Rex and Justin get into the mechanics of Katana's "DeFi flywheel"—vault bridge yields, chain-owned liquidity, VE tokenomics that span the whole chain—and what they learned from earlie...
2025-12-251h 04
Signaling TheoryValue Accrual and Market Reality in DeFi w/ Adrian (Steakhouse Financial)Stakehouse cofounder Adrian Steakhouse joins Rex to unpack what “curators” actually do: turning DeFi’s powerful—but nerd-only—primitives into infrastructure that feels like a normal financial product, including the behind-the-scenes rails powering stablecoin yield inside apps like Coinbase. From there, they get honest about why innovation feels slower post-2021, where the real open problems still are (insurance, first-loss capital, and credit), and why most crypto tokens fail to hold long-term value—while a handful (like Aave and Sky) look more “investable” because they embed clearer ownership or governance rights.They close with a grounded look at stableco...
2025-12-181h 06
Signaling TheoryWhat Happened to the Modular Blockchain Thesis? w/ Dino (Fluent)Rex sits down with Dino, co-founder of Fluent, to ask a simple but loaded question: what actually happened to the modular / “VM meta” everyone was so excited about? They trace how the narrative around modular blockchains went from red-hot to ice-cold, what still matters underneath the hype cycle, and why today’s real bottleneck isn’t infra anymore but product taste, startup execution, and culture. Along the way they talk about “price is the product,” the blurring line between good and bad actors, and why it’s so hard to attract serious builders who treat blockchains as boring backend tools rather t...
2025-12-1144 min
Signaling TheoryZK, TEEs and Verifiable Compute w/ Vanishree Rao (Fermah)Rex talks with cryptographer Vanishree Rao, founder of Fermah, about what verifiable compute actually unlocks—and why the real story isn’t “ZK eats the world” just yet. They get into ZK vs trusted execution environments (TEEs), how oracles really fail in practice, why restaking got ahead of real demand, and what a universal proof market like Fermah is doing differently. It’s a grounded look at the compute layer under rollups, oracles, and AI agents—and where the next wave of applications might actually come from.
2025-12-041h 13
Signaling TheoryUpgrading EVM Application Security w/ Bobafetador (Drosera)Drosera just shipped to Ethereum mainnet after two years of grinding weekends, audits, and architecture debates—and in this episode we unpack what they’ve actually built and why it matters. Boba, co-founder of Drosera, joins Rex to explain how “traps” let smart contracts watch on-chain conditions and automatically react, turning Ethereum into a far more expressive, always-on system without bolting everything onto a centralized backend. They dig into Drosera’s “L1.5 bandwidth layer” design, how shadow forks and ZK proofs make continuous off-chain execution verifiable on Ethereum, and why decentralization isn’t just about more nodes—it’s about who can...
2025-11-271h 11
Signaling TheoryWhy Are Vibes So Bad This Cycle w/ FiddyRex sits down with Fiddy — DeFi “trench warrior,” Curve and Lido contributor — to ask a simple but uncomfortable question: why do the vibes feel so bad this cycle? They trace the arc from the 2020 DeFi summer through Do Kwon, FTX, and the meme-coin era, and talk about what happens when years of extraction, broken experiments, and aggressive speculation finally catch up with a still-nascent ecosystem. Along the way, they dig into how Twitter’s algorithm shift and the rise of easy online gambling have siphoned energy away from “builder crypto” toward pure conflict and get-rich-quick schemes. From there, th...
2025-11-201h 15
Signaling TheoryA DAT for Stablecoins w/ Colin Bulter (Mega Matrix)In this episode of Signaling Theory, Rex sits down with Colin Butler, co-founder of Mega Matrix, a digital asset treasury (DAT) focused on becoming the world’s leading publicly traded stablecoin company. They dig into why stablecoins might be a multi-trillion-dollar market by 2028, how value actually accrues across the stablecoin stack, and why governance tokens and cash-generating protocols could offer very different return profiles than today’s “number go up” narratives.From Ethena’s USDe and the basis-trade stablecoin model, to novel structures like STBL and ideas like GPU-backed stablecoins, Colin walks through where he thinks the next wave...
2025-11-131h 06
Signaling TheoryUpgrading the MEV Supply Chain w/ Drew Van Der Werff (Commit-Boost & Fabric)Rex sits down with Drew Van Der Werff, founder of Commit-Boost and Fabric, to talk about the future of Ethereum block production: from validator autonomy and pre-confirmations to full-slot auctions, inclusion lists, and what a more robust PBS pipeline might look like. They dig into how Commit-Boost turns the validator stack into an “app store” for block construction, why derivatives on blockspace could actually stabilize Ethereum, and where TEEs fit (or don’t) alongside ZK. The conversation zooms out to the state of the Ethereum social layer, the role of the EF and client teams, and why Drew splits his ti...
2025-11-0656 min
Strange Water PodcastIntroducing: Signaling TheoryIntroducing Signaling Theory, a new podcast by Rex Kirshner (LogarithmicRex). Signaling Theory cuts through crypto’s noise to find the real signals. Host Rex Kirshner joins builders, thinkers, and researchers who are shaping the space for deep, nuanced and informed conversations. Curiosity first, signal over noise.New Episodes every ThursdayAvailable on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcastsMore info: SigTheory.com
2025-10-3002 min
Signaling TheoryStablecoins: History, Mechanics, Policy w/ Sam Kazemian (Frax Finance)Stablecoins, then and now. Host Rex Kirshner sits down with Sam Kazemian, founder of Frax, to trace the anthropology of stablecoins from seigniorage-share thought experiments and DeFi flywheels to today’s issuer platforms, “genius-compatible” collateral, and vertically-integrated payment rails. They unpack lessons from the Terra collapse, why Frax split payment vs. yield-bearing units (FRAX vs. sFRAX), and how issuance partnerships became the new Curve wars. The second half gets spicy: stock (TVL/yield) vs. flow (payments/settlement) business models, whether branded stables like Hyperliquid’s USDH make sense, and a pragmatic take on CBDCs (“good” vs. Orwellian versions), ex...
2025-10-301h 13
Signaling TheoryIntroducing: Signaling TheoryIntroducing Signaling Theory, a new podcast by Rex Kirshner (LogarithmicRex). Signaling Theory cuts through crypto’s noise to find the real signals. Host Rex Kirshner joins builders, thinkers, and researchers who are shaping the space for deep, nuanced and informed conversations. Curiosity first, signal over noise.New Episodes every ThursdayAvailable on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcastsMore info: SigTheory.com
2025-10-2902 min
Strange Water PodcastHardware Acceleration for ZK Cryptography w/ Leo Fan (Cysic)Host: Leo Fan (Twitter: @leofanxiong)
Guest: Rex Kirshner (Twitter: @LogarithmicRex)
Despite the optimism and entrepreneurial energy surrounding zero knowledge cryptography (ZK), there are challenges, including the complexity of concepts, difficulty in finding and using tools, and integration issues with existing primitives. The episode introduces Leo Fan, founder of Cysic, a company addressing ZK's performance problem by creating hardware with embedded ZK primitives. The discussion delves into the challenges of achieving efficient ZK proofs and explores how Cysic's hardware aims to accelerate ZK systems, drawing parallels to the transformative potential akin to Moore's...
2023-12-211h 00
Strange Water PodcastModularity Maximalism w/ Uma Roy (Succinct Labs)Guest: Uma Roy (Twitter: @pumatheuma)
Host: Rex Kirshner (Twitter: @LogarithmicRex)
In every builder's career, there's a common experience of getting caught up in implementation details while solving complex problems, leading to the creation of custom tools or thoughtless architectures. The realization that others likely face the same challenges prompts some developers to invest time in creating tools that not only make their own development easier but can also benefit other developers. Uma Roy, the co-founder and CEO of Succinct Labs, recognized an opportunity in the field of zero-knowledge cryptography (ZK) and founded...
2023-12-141h 05