TRM Talks

Sanjeev Bhasker was a federal prosecutor, Digital Currency Counsel at DOJ, cyber counsel in the Biden White House, and acting general counsel in the second Trump administration. He is now at K&L Gates. He joins Ari for his second TRM Talks.
Sanjeev tried nearly a hundred cases as a prosecutor and used BSA reporting to trace dark-web crypto cases back through exchanges. At the White House he worked on the GENIUS Act, the AI Action Plan, the one-dollar LLM contracts with GSA, and the post-quantum cryptography executive order. On quantum he is direct: nation states are already stealing encrypted data to crack later, NIST has published PQC standards, and boards should not wait for Q Day around 2029 to act.
This conversation is not just about crypto, or quantum, or AI. It is about how the three intersect, and why we are now in an age where these technologies have to be viewed together, from a national security perspective and as a matter of policy. That is how Sanjeev approached them in government, and it runs through everything here, from the Bitcoin reserve to AI washing to Genesis Mission grant money.

Amy Oldenburg spent 26 years at Morgan Stanley — operations, emerging-market FX, the trading desk, then the firm's global emerging-market investing business — before the bank created a Head of Digital Assets seat and asked her to do it full time. In this TRM Talks, Amy joins Ari to talk about how she leveraged over two decades at the Morgan Stanley to accelerate the firm’s exploration into digital assets.
The conversation moves from bicycle-messenger settlements in India and currency devaluations to why so many of Amy’s former emerging-market FX colleagues ended up in crypto. Amy talks through what she is seeing across banking, equities, wealth, and asset management: what is possible today, what still depends on regulation, and what could change by 2028 and beyond. She also breaks down tokenization as financial plumbing — simpler systems, faster yields, and more efficient capital calls — and shares a lesson from having an expensive NFT phished from her wallet: transparency does not always mean safety.

In this episode, Ari is joined by close friends and two of the most important voices in our space: Rebecca Rettig, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Legal Officer at Jito Labs, and Michael Mosier, founding partner of Arktouros and former acting director of FinCEN.
Rebecca developed deep subject matter expertise as a financial-services litigator working with the earliest DeFi protocols, including an early pitch to Uniswap when the team numbered four people in a Williamsburg loft. Michael came through DOJ, OFAC, and FinCEN, and traces a through-line from protective orders for domestic-violence survivors to cryptography as a tool for people living under authoritarian control.
The focus is on the future of DeFi. In a brand new paper, the dynamic duo lay out a framework institutions can implement under current law, and explains why OFAC and BSA enforcement has never targeted SWIFT, telecoms, or RPC nodes the way critics fear it will target crypto infrastructure. They cover the GENIUS Act's focus on issuers rather than networks, US DOJ’s prosecution of a Tornado Cash developer and the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act. Mosier also addresses the panic around AI, arguing these systems function as motion sensors rather than a person standing in front of the car with a red flag.

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.