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, joins Ari to walk through what changed, why AUSTRAC redefined digital currency exchanges as "virtual asset service providers" to align with FATF standards, and what that reclassification means in practice for crypto businesses now covering custody, wallets, and transfers, not just cash-to-crypto conversions. Brad has spent more than two decades at AUSTRAC across intelligence, policy, international engagement, and now supervision, following a career in Australian law enforcement.
The conversation digs into AUSTRAC's focus on outcomes-focused, risk-based supervision, the scale of the fraud threat Australia is confronting — part of an estimated USD 500 billion in global fraud losses in 2024 and 2025 — and how the Beacon Network, the largest public-private information-sharing and seizure network in the crypto ecosystem, is helping regulators and exchanges move faster against bad actors.

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 Ari to trace a career that runs from a plaintiff's law firm and a federal clerkship for Judge Urbina of the US District Court for the District of Columbia, through the SEC's Office of General Counsel and a stint working alongside former SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt, to launching her own law firm built around the convergence of traditional and digital financial markets. Her name has even come up as a potential contender for SEC Chair.
The conversation moves from the day-to-day of her practice — clients navigating exemptive relief, subpoenas, and the "security or commodity" question she thinks misses the point — to what she's building next. Through Sophie Lex, she's developing proprietary AI trained on her own legal reasoning to help lawyers work faster without losing judgment, arguing AI should scale lawyers rather than replace them. She also shares her take on SEC Chair Paul Atkins' modernization push and why she thinks exemptive relief, more than new legislation, could unlock effective crypto regulation today.

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 Ari to discuss how the post-9/11 financial architecture still underpins U.S. national security—and how it must evolve for an era of cryptocurrency, AI, and emerging technologies.

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 it.
Vatsa joins Ari to talk through what building ComplyAdvantage have taught him about fighting financial crime as a network problem rather than a point-in-time compliance exercise.
The conversation covers the industrialization of fraud (synthetic IDs, money mule recruitment at scale, AI-enabled targeting of retirees and immigrant workers), the architecture behind ComplyAdvantage's new Mesh platform, and the case for information sharing as a structural defense against crime networks whose strength lies in their interconnection. TRM focuses on the on-chain world; ComplyAdvantage focuses on the off-chain. Together, Vatsa argues, they cover the full picture.

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 what investor protection, custody, and market integrity actually look like in a market structure with no historical precedent.
The SEC has provided guidance and clarity, the CFTC is emerging as a consequential voice on digital assets, perps and prediction markets , and the work ahead is proving that a new market structure can deliver on those fundamentals.
The conversation covers the legal architecture being built right now, the national security stakes of DeFi exploits, the case for privacy as a precondition for institutional capital, and the founding mission of the show: amplifying the women writing crypto's rulebook. No Mr. Big’s on this one, just the Carrie Bradshaws of crypto providing cutting edge legal insights.
Origin stories, journeys, and genuine friendship make this one of the most fun episodes of the year.