Couchonomics with Arjun · 2026-04-14 · 47 min
Before a trading app reaches a user, there is an entire system underneath it doing the real heavy lifting. In this episode of Couchonomics with Arjun, Arjun is joined by Yoshi Yokokawa, Co-Founder and CEO of Alpaca, for a sharp and wide-ranging conversation on brokerage infrastructure, on-chain finance, market access, and what it really takes to build financial products at global scale. It is a grounded look at how trading has shifted from web to mobile to on-chain, why financial access still needs to be designed around culture and local behaviour, and what happens when traditional markets and digital assets begin moving closer together. From tokenised stocks and stablecoins to prediction markets and infrastructure complexity, this conversation explores the less visible layer of finance, the one powering the apps, products, and experiences users see on the surface. They also discuss why infrastructure should behave like a utility, what responsibilities licensed platforms carry around investor protection and market integrity, and why the long-term shift toward on-chain finance may be less about ideology and more about real product-market fit.
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