🎙️ My guest today is Allen Farrington, writer, investor, and co-founder of Axiom, a Bitcoin-focused venture capital firm backing companies that use Bitcoin as real infrastructure rather than speculation. Allen co-authored “Bitcoin is Venice” and “Only the Strong Survive” and draws on a background in math, philosophy, Austrian economics, and long-term equity investing to explain why Bitcoin is both a technological breakthrough and a venture opportunity hiding in plain sight. In this episode, he shares why he believes the most valuable startups will use Bitcoin as invisible plumbing for payments, energy, and financial services rather than marketing themselves as “Bitcoin companies.” We explore why current stablecoin systems break under real demand, how Lightning and Taproot Assets enable issuer competition and scalable payments, and why the long arc ends with e-cash and Bitcoin-native money. Allen frames Axiom’s edge as “temporal arbitrage”: investing early where technical understanding and adoption are low, anticipating that in a decade the market will recognize the value created by Bitcoin-based infrastructure.
This episode is also on Twitter, Spotify, YouTube, Fountain, Rumble and more.
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We talked about:
00:00 - Coming Up
01:12 - Introduction to Allen
03:20 - Discovering Bitcoin & Career Trajectory
12:03 - Ad Break - Trezor & BitVault
15:22 - Investment Philosophy & Lightning as Inspiration
17:52 - Company and Investment Selection for Axiom VC
30:12 - Stablecoins & Regulations
37:32 - Why Most Stablecoin Systems Fail At Scale?
44:50 - The Importance of Stablecoin Issuers
51:16 - Stablecoins on Lightning & Taproot Assets: A New Approach
1:01:23 - The Future of Digital Money: E-Cash
1:05:47 - Steps to Migrate From Fiat To Bitcoin
1:10:28 - Companies to Watch in the Bitcoin & Lightning Space
1:16:43 - Allen Loves What He Does & Why He Does It
My takeaways from this episode:
Allen shares how his early interests in math, philosophy, and Austrian economics, combined with software development experience, predisposed him to take Bitcoin seriously
He recounts his seven years at Baillie Gifford, where long-term equity investing shaped his thinking on time horizons, value creation, and the dangers of fiat-driven short-termism
Allen explains how the rise of Lightning Network adoption and Bitcoin-aligned startups around 2021 created the right conditions to launch Axiom, a venture capital firm focused on companies using Bitcoin as real infrastructure
He speaks candidly about Axiom’s thesis: avoiding hype-driven “crypto” plays, focusing instead on businesses where Bitcoin enables products or services that would be impossible or far more expensive under legacy financial rails
Allen breaks down why most stablecoin systems fail at scale: on-chain fees skyrocket under real demand, pushing issuers toward centralized “layer twos” that end up as permissioned databases, losing any decentralization pretense
He argues that Taproot Assets and Lightning fix these problems by allowing issuer competition, near-zero fees, and payments between users trusting different issuers, opening the door to private, scalable, global settlements
Allen predicts a multi-phase evolution: from stablecoins on crypto rails, to Lightning and Taproot Assets, to e-cash integration, and finally Bitcoin-native money as the default standard
He sees the long-term trajectory as a Trojan horse: users adopt better payment rails for dollars, only to realize over time that the underlying system is Bitcoin, gradually shifting the world toward a Bitcoin-denominated economy
He highlights companies like Voltage, ArK Labs, Musket, CoinCorner, and Neutron as critical players building the infrastructure for payments, liquidity, and merchant adoption in this new ecosystem
Allen frames Axiom’s edge as “temporal arbitrage”: investing early where technical understanding and adoption are low, anticipating that in a decade the market will recognize the value created by Bitcoin-based infrastructure
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Follow Allen Farrington:
Allen’s Twitter | Axiom’s Website
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