Two years ago, Maya Chen was shipping payment features at a retail bank and thought "cold storage" was a warehouse term. Today she designs tokenized-deposit flows. This episode is the honest version of that journey: the acronyms she pretended to understand, the mental models that finally clicked, and why she thinks her banking background turned out to be a superpower, not a handicap.
We talk about what TradFi people consistently get right about risk, what crypto-native people consistently get right about speed, and the translation layer both sides keep failing to build.
Resources mentioned
- Level 1: First principles, the track Maya wishes existed when she started
- EP 10 · Custody: who actually holds your tokens?
- The Rayls litepaper (the readable parts, as flagged in the episode)
- You already know more than you think. If you understand settlement risk, you understand why finality matters. The concepts transfer; only the vocabulary is new.
- Learn by moving small amounts. Maya's turning point was sending $5, not reading whitepapers.
- Banking instincts are an asset. The industry needs people who ask "what happens when this fails?" before "how fast is it?"
- Skip the jargon debates. Nobody agrees on definitions anyway; anchor on what the system does.
Full transcript
HOST: Maya, take me back to your first week. Someone says "just connect your wallet" —
MAYA: And I looked in my bag! Genuinely. I had fifteen years in payments, I could draw you the entire card-clearing lifecycle from memory, and I did not know if a wallet was hardware, software, or a metaphor. Spoiler: it's all three, which is exactly the problem…
HOST: That's the gap this whole show exists for, honestly.
[Transcript continues. Full text ships with the production build, provided for accessibility and search.]