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CoinDesk Podcast Network

IOTA’s Karen O'Brien on The $35 Trillion Bet on Industrial Blockchain

CoinDesk Podcast Network

CoinDesk

News, Tech News, Daily News, Business News

4.7698 Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2026

⏱️ 33 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

IOTA CMO, Karen O’Brien reveals the high-stakes roadmap to transform the $35 trillion global trade industry from archaic paper systems into a frictionless, blockchain-powered infrastructure. Karen O’Brien, CMO of IOTA, breaks down why the industry is finally hitting a much-needed trust reset, trading short-term hype for the work of fixing global trade. O’Brien touches on how she’s helping solve the $35 trillion "paper and email" bottleneck to create an invisible backbone for global supply chains—a true blockchain for machines. - Links mentioned from the podcast:  Karen's Twitter  IOTA Website - Follow us on Twitter: Sam Ewen, CoinDesk - "Gen C" features host Sam Ewen. Executive produced by Uyen Truong.

Transcript

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0:00.0

What has surprised me is the thirst for authenticity, the thirst for building real things and long-term

0:08.2

things that exists in crypto right now.

0:17.0

Welcome everyone to Gen C.

0:18.8

This season, we are really focusing on understanding the different

0:22.6

people who are building, influencing, trying to chart the future, specifically through

0:27.9

blockchain and crypto technologies. We have Karen O'Brien on with us today. Karen is someone we met

0:35.4

when she was VP of marketing over at Avalanche. She's now the

0:38.9

CMO at Iota. Iota is a blockchain that's focused specifically on supply chain, the internet

0:45.9

of things, and how sensors and data and kind of the machinery of how sort of stuff moves around the

0:53.5

world can be measured and can be ideally put into a form

0:57.5

that is harder to manipulate. A lot of sort of back-end businesses run on very archaic software,

1:05.7

if it's even software, often it's just pieces of paper. And there is a bunch of folks who really look at blockchain

1:12.4

as an opportunity to sort of rewrite that. So with that said, we're going to get to Karen O'Brien

1:20.0

from Iota. But first, please make sure you subscribe to Gen C and to the CoinDest Podcast Network.

1:27.8

Know that we have consensus Hong Kong coming up in just a few weeks.

1:31.5

So if you haven't gotten your ticket, check that out.

1:34.4

And right after the break, we'll come back with Karen O'Brien.

1:42.7

I'm here with Karen O'Brien. Karen is the CMO of Iota. I'm here with Karen O'Brien.

1:44.8

Karen is the CMO of Iota.

1:47.1

I'm very excited to have this conversation.

1:49.6

We've known each other for a little while.

1:51.4

Yes, we are.

...

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