Wael Rajab is the CMO of PerpTools and co-founder and director of DEXT Ventures, the capital arm of DEXTools — one of DeFi's original and most widely used on-chain trading and analytics platforms. With nearly a decade in crypto and a portfolio spanning over 100 investments across 150+ integrated blockchains, Wael has been at the centre of decentralised finance's growth from data dashboard to full trading stack.

DEXTools built its reputation as the go-to platform for on-chain token analytics — the place traders head when they want to understand what's happening across chains without needing to be technically fluent. But the landscape has shifted dramatically. DEX volumes have grown nearly eightfold in two years, from $81 billion to roughly $740 billion, and perpetuals trading has become one of the most contested battlegrounds in DeFi. PerpTools is DEXTools' answer: a native perps vertical that gives millions of existing users the ability to trade derivatives without ever leaving the platform they already trust.

What makes the PerpTools story compelling isn't just the product — it's the distribution. Most new perp DEXs face a brutal cold-start problem, spending heavily on user acquisition with uncertain results. PerpTools launched into an established audience and reached 40,000 users and over $150 million in traded volume within weeks of its beta. Built on Orderly's shared order book and liquidity layer, the platform is designed for speed and capital efficiency, with sub-200 millisecond latency and leverage up to 100x — all self-custodial and permissionless.

The roadmap is where things get genuinely interesting. AI trading agents — back-tested to average 20% monthly returns — are being rolled out in tranches to top community members, with copy trading and vault-based strategies to follow. Prediction markets, a tap-to-earn trading game, and a token generation event targeted within six to eight months round out a product pipeline designed to make the platform as sticky as possible. Wael also opens up on competing in a space where Hyperliquid looms large, the strategic logic behind the Orderly partnership, and why DeFi's permissionless, borderless architecture represents a genuine levelling of the financial playing field.

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Andy sits down with Donald Griswold, director of the new indie documentary feature Abundant, and Sheila Dohmann, Chief Marketing Officer at Stuff.io, the decentralized media platform bringing the film to audiences worldwide. Abundant examines generosity, scarcity and what drives the rarest altruists among us — non-directed kidney donors who give a kidney to a complete stranger — and it's being distributed exclusively via blockchain streaming starting March 26th.

This conversation cuts to the heart of what's broken in independent film distribution. Donald explains how the traditional model leaves filmmakers at the mercy of major streamers who treat art as content consumption metrics, with barely-cracked doors for indie creators. His experience pitching Abundant to Hollywood as an original led to an unexpected revelation: a blockchain-native platform could offer something no subscription streamer could — true audience ownership, transparent economics and a real business plan filmmakers can take to investors. For any creator who's ever struggled to answer the question "what's your distribution plan?", this is essential listening.

Sheila breaks down exactly how Stuff.io works under the hood, and for a crypto-savvy audience, the architecture is genuinely interesting. The platform shatters media files into millions of encrypted shards stored across IPFS, reassembled second-by-second only when an owner authenticates. It's a fundamentally anti-piracy design that also solves the ownership problem — unlike every major streaming licence that vanishes if the platform shuts down. She tells the cautionary tale of Stuff.io's origin: a successful e-book startup was sold to a VC who simply closed it, and eight million people lost their libraries overnight. That moment sparked the mission to put digital ownership on-chain permanently.

The most compelling thread is where the technology meets the cause. Abundant isn't just a film about kidneys — it's a general audience exploration of generosity and scarcity with a twist ending that leaves audiences emotionally moved. Donald explains how blockchain portability enables a gifting strategy where medical practices, transplant centres and kidney community affiliates can buy copies and pass them on, just like a DVD. For a community where most people with kidney disease don't even know they have it, that frictionless sharing could literally save lives. Sheila extends the vision further into banned books on the blockchain, historical document preservation and IP protection for creators — a picture of Stuff.io as essential cultural infrastructure, not just another streaming app.

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Jessica Ellerm and Kent Grogan are the co-founders of Themelia, a platform building the next infrastructure layer for crypto investment through custom indexing technology. Jessica comes from a fintech background — including a stint at ASX-listed payments platform Tyro and a superannuation startup she founded and sold — while Kent ran a hedge fund for years before moving into portfolio management and FinTech. Together, they're tackling one of the most underserved problems in digital assets: how do you get sensible, risk-adjusted exposure to a market of 52 million tokens without getting wrecked?

Crypto has a reputation problem, and Kent and Jessica argue it's largely structural. Most tokens are created, pump briefly, and go to zero — which means a naive index that mirrors the full market is essentially a vehicle for buying failure at scale. The Themelia thesis is that an index needs to do better than that: not just collapse the market into something manageable, but actively filter for tokens with genuine staying power before they've already made their biggest moves. Kent draws a sharp analogy to equities — nobody in TradFi just buys one marquee stock and calls it a portfolio, yet that's essentially what most crypto investors do with Bitcoin. The pair make a compelling case that the infrastructure for smarter diversification is long overdue.

The platform's most interesting innovation is the distinction between static and dynamic indexing. Jessica points out that most existing crypto index products — exchange bundles, early ETF attempts — don't move fast enough to keep pace with shifting narratives. Themelia's custom index builder lets users set their own filters, backtest against up to three years of historical data, then execute and auto-rebalance directly through connected exchange accounts like Coinbase, Binance, or Bybit. For those who don't want to build their own, the platform is evolving toward an "ensembling" model — aggregating the token picks of vetted crypto analysts into a curated house index that does the filtering work for you.

The bigger picture is a genuine gap in the market. Jessica notes that index products now capture the majority of capital flows in traditional finance — from retail investors all the way to pension funds — yet less than 0.1% of the total crypto market is currently invested through indexes. That's not just an opportunity for Themelia; it's an argument for why the space needs this infrastructure to mature. If the house index can demonstrate better risk-adjusted returns than simply holding Bitcoin, it could become the entry point that brings cautious, sideline-sitting investors into the market for the first time.

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