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 Sheila extends the vision further into banned books on the blockchain, historical document preservation and IP protection for creators — a picture of Stuff.io as essential cultural infrastructure, not just another streaming app.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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Bisher Khudeira is the COO of Stormrake, a Melbourne-based digital asset brokerage offering best execution trading, institutional custody, and asset management across Bitcoin, digital assets, and tokenized real-world assets. Bisher joins Andy to explain why the brokerage model beats the exchange model for serious investors, what it takes to build a crypto business in one of the most hostile banking environments in the developed world, and why Stormrake is about to plant its flag in Dallas.

Bisher has spent a decade in financial services, starting in foreign exchange brokering in 2015 and buying his first Bitcoin in a McDonald's car park in 2016 via peer-to-peer. He joined Stormrake in 2022, bought into the business, and has helped scale it from fewer than a hundred clients — mostly friends and family — to over 10,000 across Australia, with a US launch now weeks away. He walks through the core brokerage proposition: Stormrake faces around 20 exchanges and OTC desks simultaneously, aggregates client orders to access deeper liquidity and sharper pricing, and charges a flat commission with no spread markup. The result is what Bisher calls the Satoshi maximiser — clients walk away with more Bitcoin per transaction than they would going it alone on a single exchange.

The conversation covers Stormrake's two wholesale funds: the Cumulus class, which targets picks-and-shovels digital assets like Ethereum, Solana, Hyperliquid, and Chainlink alongside select private equity plays; and the Stratus class, a Bitcoin and gold fund designed to smooth out Bitcoin's volatility while improving on gold's growth profile. Bisher also details the custody offering — fully institutional grade with insurance, separation of funds, and cold storage as default — while stressing that Stormrake fully supports self-custody for clients who want it. The US expansion into Dallas, two years in the making and launching end of April 2026, is built as a direct lift-and-shift of the Australian model into a jurisdiction where digital asset brokers are treated as normal participants in the economy rather than pariahs.

Bisher doesn't hold back on the state of Australian banking, describing three personal debankings and ongoing hostility from the big four toward crypto businesses and their clients. He argues Australia is a decade behind the US on digital asset regulation, with an AFSL licensing regime for digital assets only coming into effect by mid-2026. Despite that, he frames the challenge as deeply rewarding — building a business from zero in a nascent industry with no playbook, bootstrapped the entire way, with the goal of becoming a digital-era complement to the likes of Charles Schwab or E-Trade. The episode closes with Bisher's market outlook: he sees Bitcoin within 10 to 20 percent of its bottom, expects three to four months of sideways chop, and is watching large institutional buyers accumulate aggressively at current levels ahead of what he believes will be a run toward $200,000 and beyond.

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