CB On Air

The episode delivers a genuine data payload around litigation trends and stablecoin taxonomy that most B2B operators won't have seen, but it is padded with hedged academic throat-clearing and speculative statements about AI agents that add little actionable value.

“since 2017 there have been um, more than uh, 1380 court cases involving um, crypto and source code. And um, a subset of these cases consists of uh, 663 court cases around smart contracts”

“cases related to definitions of um, securities commodities in relationship to smart contracts go down. But cases related to forfeiture penalties, bankruptcy recovery or IP intellectual property cases, they go up”

Using litigation as a lens on blockchain trust failures is a genuinely underused framing, but the 'code is law' debate is explicitly traced back to Lessig in the late 1990s and the three-position synthesis adds modest novelty; the AI-agents-as-machine-economy riff is very fashionable right now.

“position number one, which emerged already in the late 1990s, so more than a quarter century ago, is saying, well, code, uh, can regulate behavior, but that's not legitimate law”

“for me the question is what happens to locked when um, we see machines increasing the organizing situations to which legal rules must respond”

Preda is a credible academic researcher with a real ongoing empirical project on crypto litigation, but he is a professor studying these systems rather than an operator or practitioner who has built or regulated stablecoins at scale; his knowledge is solid but observational.

“I've started this pro, this is an ongoing research project. I started it and I'm looking uh, at various arguments, uh, made in quartz”

“it's very exciting as a field of research”

The episode is anchored by concrete court-case counts, named chains with differentiated validator mechanics, named stablecoins with governance models, and a very recent real-world data point (HSBC license date), which is well above average for a podcast of this length.

“since 2017 there have been um, more than uh, 1380 court cases involving um, crypto and source code. And um, a subset of these cases consists of uh, 663 court cases around smart contracts”

“the monetary authority issuing LI to licenses this April, in April 2026 one of them to HSBC which is a major global bank for such a fiat backed stable coins”

The host asks broad, scene-setting questions that function as permission slips for the guest to monologue; there is no pushback on speculative claims about AI agents, no probing of the litigation data methodology, and the episode closes with the notably weak 'Any thoughts? Anything you wanted to add?'

“Any thoughts? Anything you um, wanted to add?”

“And it sounds like that's only going to become even more complex as we have things like AI agents coordinating all that.”