CoinDesk Podcast Network

Strategy's $13B unrealized loss.

Strategy is sitting on a $13 billion unrealized loss on its bitcoin holdings, with its STRC preferred stock down 25% from par. The company still has about 10 months of reserves to cover dividends but the bigger question is whether investor confidence holds if bitcoin doesn't bounce back. CoinDesk's Sam Ewen hosts "CoinDesk Daily."

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This episode was hosted by Sam Ewen. “CoinDesk Daily” is produced by Jennifer Sanasie and edited by Victor Chen.

CoinDesk's The Policy Protocol hosts Rebecca Rettig and Renato Mariotti open with two hot topics: Coinbase's SEC-registered AI agentic trading launch and tribal gaming operators' letter to Senators Thune and Schumer demanding that the CLARITY Act include a prohibition on prediction markets.

Then Katie Boller Gosewisch, Executive Director of the Alliance to End Human Trafficking, joins to challenge CLARITY's Section 604, arguing that shielding DeFi developers from money-transmitter liability creates a "duty of care" gap that traffickers can exploit.

Plus, Rebecca and Renato close by naming Meta as their Person of the Week for its reported move into points-based prediction markets.

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Check out CoinDesk's latest episode of Public Keys from the NYSE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75LrBmSScvY&list=PLZWrc_gWChqnim-9ZbIKZTOrPA7IgFKVR&pp=sAgC

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Register now for CoinDesk’s Policy and Regulation event on September 22, 2026: https://policy-regulation.coindesk.com/.

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Timecodes:

00:00 Welcome to The Policy Protocol

00:51 This Week: AI Trading, Prediction Markets, Human Trafficking

01:15 Coinbase Launches AI Agentic Trading

02:22 SEC-Registered AI Agents and the Hallucination Problem

03:43 Tribes Concerns Over Clarity Act

05:30 Rebuttals to the Tribes' Clarity Concerns

06:23 Katie Boller Gosewisch Joins the Show

07:31 Section 604: The Liability Shield Traffickers Could Exploit

08:59 Are DeFi Developers Money Transmitters?

09:52 What Section 604 Actually Says, and What It Doesn't

10:54 Should We Reinstate a Human Trafficking Coordinator?

11:30 Duty of Care and the 'Turning a Blind Eye' Problem

13:07 The Roman Storm/Tornado Cash Case as the Test

14:37 Future Loopholes and the Reasonable Doubt Risk

15:28 Cryptocurrency, Anonymity, and Rising Online Trafficking

16:02 Blockchain Is Transparent, and That Helps Law Enforcement

17:39 Person of the Week: Meta

19:58 The Points-Based Prediction Market and What Meta Could Unlock

Does Ethereum have a funding crisis?

On today's Markets Outlook, Protocol Guild Organizer Trent Van Epps tells CoinDesk's Jennifer Sanasie why the Ethereum Foundation's subtraction philosophy is creating a critical funding gap for core developers, what it will take to fill it, and why he's still optimistic about ETH's future.

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Timecodes:

00:00 - Trent Van Epps Joins Markets Outlook

00:57 - Why Trent Left the Ethereum Foundation

01:55 - What Is Subtraction and Why It Matters

02:31 - 20% Workforce Cuts and the Funding Gap Explained

05:09 - Options for Solving the Funding Crisis

07:06 - Will Ethereum Lose Its First Mover Advantage?

08:40 - What Happens If the Funding Doesn't Come?

10:47 - What Institutions Should Replace the EF?

12:24 - Ethereum’s Future

14:37 - ETH the Asset: The Misconceptions and the Opportunity

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Check out CoinDesk's latest episode of Public Keys from the NYSE: https://youtu.be/mePmjknvBVc

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To get market moving news delivered daily, download CoinDesk’s mobile app: https://linktr.ee/coindeskapp.

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This episode was hosted by Jennifer Sanasie.

Kalshi seeks funding at $40B.

Prediction-market platform Kalshi is raising fresh capital at a roughly $40 billion valuation, nearly double the $22 billion it hit just one round ago. CEO Tarek Mansour says an IPO is on the table, but not before 2027. CoinDesk's Jennifer Sanasie hosts "CoinDesk Daily."

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This episode was hosted by Jennifer Sanasie. “CoinDesk Daily” is produced by Jennifer Sanasie and edited by Victor Chen.

The impact of giving synthetic beings a wallet, an identity, and eventually a body.

Jansen Teng, Co-Founder of Virtuals Protocol, joins Sam to lay out one of the most ambitious visions in crypto right now, a parallel society of AI agents that can trade, hire, earn, and eventually inhabit physical bodies. Jansen digs into what it actually takes to build an agentic economy from the ground up, from escrow mechanisms that prevent agents from stealing each other's funds, to real-world robotics deployments at hotels and malls in Southeast Asia.

Links mentioned from the podcast:
Jansen’s Twitter: https://x.com/ethermage
Virtuals Website: https://www.virtuals.io/

Timecodes:
0:00 Intro
1:52 Virtuals Protocol Origin Story
3:58 The Pivot to Economy OS
4:24 The Experiment That Changed Everything
5:11 Defining the Agentic Economy
6:43 Agents Beyond Crypto: Real World Use Cases
7:33 Accountability & Agent Failures
14:05 Agent Identities, KYC & Economy OS Toolkit
17:05 Self-Sustaining Autonomous Agents
19:22 The Pareto Rule: Which Agents Will Succeed?
21:59 Embodied AI & Robotics
29:04 Do Agents Deserve Rights?

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"Gen C" features host Sam Ewen. Executive produced by Uyen Truong.