Stay ConnectedEpicenter brings you in-depth conversations about the technical, economic and social implications of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies. Every week, we interview business leaders, engineers academics and entrepreneurs, and bring you a diverse spectrum of opinions and points of view.
Epicenter is hosted by Sebastien Couture, Brian Fabian Crain, Friederike Ernst, Meher Roy and Felix Lutsch. Since 2014, our episodes have been downloaded over 8 million times.
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Stripe has established itself as a leading payment solution for both enterprises as well as startups and individual sellers. By abstracting away all the complexities of traditional payment rails through simple plug-and-play APIs, Stripe created a facile route for cross-border payments, simplifying e-commerce. Similarly, Stripe’s recent integration of stablecoins could further bolster the adoption of decentralised payment solutions, be them USD or other currency proxies. This allows businesses to reach more markets, at a lower cost, with near-instantaneous settlement.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
While L2 rollups did help scale Ethereum, they also created siloed ecosystems, all fighting over the same liquidity, users and devs. t1 Protocol is building layer-2 infrastructure to achieve seamless cross-rollup interoperability through real-time proving, powered by TEEs. t1's low-latency with 1-second block times provides faster preconfirmations, significantly improving UX, all while maintaining full Ethereum composability.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
As the summer tour of European crypto conferences landed in Berlin, one of crypto’s cradles, we couldn’t miss DappCon 25, where we got to sit with Jerome de Tychey, Nixorokish & Joshua Dávila to discuss Ethereum’s restructure and whether its culture is still relevant to the wider crypto community. Join us for a fascinating discussion on the impact of crypto politicization and how Ethereum’s ecosystem evolved amidst a society with ever-changing values.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
Bitcoin remains an untapped source of net-new liquidity that could be injected into DeFi. This would completely reshape Bitcoin’s utilization from a mere store of value to a liquid asset that can be ported cross-chain and traded like a liquid staking derivative. Lombard’s LBTC builds upon Babylon’s Bitcoin staking primitive and aims to unlock new yield sources for the industry’s leading asset by increasing its DeFi utilization.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.
Apart from incentivising market participants to secure the network through inflationary rewards, many consider staking as an equivalent of stock dividend yield. As a result, although Bitcoin is regarded as digital gold, protocols are looking for ways to increase its utilisation in DeFi and, ultimately, generate yield. Nowadays, while newer networks are struggling to attract investors and sustain a healthy, decentralised validator set, more established blockchains capture the lion’s share of PoS actors. However, in a constant race for profit basis points, centralised consolidation of stakers seems inevitable. Join us for a fascinating discussion on the staking landscape and the challenges it may present to decentralisation.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sebastien Couture.
After a decade of existence, Ethereum has gone a long way from its initial whitepaper, yet many efforts in scaling and finding product-market-fit have been severely criticized for falling short of their promise. However, despite numerous other ‘Ethereum killers’ being launched over the years, none has managed to attract so many developers and liquidity while sticking true to ethos that (once) powered and united this industry. This year’s ETHPrague plans to confront exactly these existential challenges and steward community culture towards addressing outside criticism and external reality checks. Ethereum’s development, while adapting to market pressures, it always aimed to stick true to its core values in order to remain a technological bedrock for the future of humanity.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
We couldn’t miss the Avalanche Summit where we sat down with Emin Gün Sirer, co-founder & CEO of Ava Labs, to discuss the evolution of Avalanche’s ecosystem and how HyperSDK ushers in a scalable, interoperable, multi-chain future. Join us for a fascinating discussion on Avalanche’s approach to decentralisation, scalability & interoperability, and learn why real-world applicability relies heavily on bespoke blockchain solutions.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.
Blockchain architecture is constantly being forced to adapt to new technologies, as well as to meet new demands from users and builders. While the idea of apps building their own chains was first explored by Cosmos, it lacked the support and tooling to see it succeed. Later on, rollups also took the centerstage of Ethereum’s scaling roadmap, but due to their general purpose design, it led to a cannibalistic ecosystem. Initia learned from these 2 models and combined the best of both worlds: it built a full-stack framework for a seamless DevEx from the get-go and, more importantly, it designed its tokenomics in order to ensure maximum incentive alignment for its appchains. While the former decision removed the need for each separate chain to reinvent the wheel and risk ending up ‘a jack of all trades, master of none’, the latter ensured that appchains would not extract value away from the L1.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.
As society evolves, so do its values and principles, but is that desirable for technology that seeks to build the most reliable, trustless and censorship resistant global settlement layer? Ever since the rise in popularity of Solana with its inflow of retail capital in a memecoin gold rush, Ethereum became even more criticized for sticking true to its core values despite the completely divergent demands of market participants. Moreover, the rollup centric scaling roadmap seemed to further silo attention and cause liquidity fragmentation, driving away value from Ethereum mainnet. As institutional demand is expected to grow with the introduction of staking ETFs, a new executive leadership took charge of Ethereum foundation to help steer the protocol’s narrative at the intersection between community demands and Ethereum’s ethos.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
Taiko is a decentralized, Ethereum-equivalent (type I) rollup scaling solution which uses ZK technology. Taiko's goal is to scale Ethereum efficiently while maintaining security and decentralization. Being a type I zkEVM, Taiko retains full Ethereum equivalence, which creates a seamless DevEx, although this comes at the expense of UX as slower proof generation is the main trade-off. Moreover, in order to stay true to its decentralised ethos, Taiko operates as a based rollup, meaning that transaction sequencing is performed by L1 validators.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
Founded by former Meta Diem team members, Sui is a high-performance, layer-1 blockchain designed for horizontal scaling and low-latency transactions. It uses an object-centric data model and the Move programming language to enable transaction parallelization which can handle >200,000 txs/s. Sui’s goal is to combine the benefits of blockchains with Web2’s security & frictionless UX. From account abstraction & ZKLogin, to on-chain storage & data availability solutions like Walrus, Sui rebuilds the Google/AWS stack, fully on-chain and composable.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.
With an extensive experience in traditional money markets, Maple Finance was envisioned as an institutional capital marketplace which combines the transparency & capital efficiency of blockchains with the regulatory framework of TradFi. Unlike many DeFi protocols that require over-collateralized loans (e.g. Aave), Maple also specializes in under-collateralized lending, enabling greater capital efficiency for institutional borrowers. With over $6b in loans since its inception, Maple plans to further expand its offerings by including RWAs as collateral assets.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
Tally is a software platform designed to support tokenized organizations, particularly Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and crypto communities. It provides tools for launching tokens, governing protocols, and enabling staking to foster community participation and growth. Tally facilitates onchain governance, allowing transparent and decentralized decision-making for managing funds, grants, and protocol upgrades. It powers major blockchain ecosystems like Arbitrum, ZKsync, Uniswap DAO and Wormhole DAO by providing interfaces for proposal creation, voting, and staking. The Tally Protocol further enhances this by offering a liquidity layer for governance tokens, that allow token holders to earn staking rewards while retaining voting rights and participating in DeFi.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
Namechain is an L2 developed by ENS Labs, to enhance the scalability and efficiency of managing decentralized identities on Ethereum. It is designed to work in tandem with ENS V2, which introduced a hierarchical registry system for more efficient subdomain management and custom resolvers. A key vision for Namechain is to unify multi-chain user identities, creating a "digital identity chain" that simplifies how users interact with the broader blockchain ecosystem. This is achieved through features like L2-to-L2 bridging, which allows users to initiate ENS-related activities from various Ethereum Layer 2 networks, not just Namechain itself.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
Ethereum’s transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake created a unique set of conditions (i.e. lack of protocol-level delegation, 32 ETH requirement, long exit queues, etc.) that led to Lido’s liquid staking model to gain huge traction, significantly eclipsing other LSD providers on native PoS chains. stETH added on-demand liquidity, bypassing withdrawal windows, while also increasing DeFi utilization and increasing yields. Moreover, by allowing users to stake any amount of ETH in pools, it removed the requirement for 32 ETH increments, ultimately improving decentralisation through long tail distribution of individual stakers. Lido V3 introduces modular stVaults which enable staking customization. This allows professional actors, such as institutional stakers, to have granular control over validators, MEV and other parameters, diversifying their investment strategies.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.
While DeFi’s ultimate goal is to provide an alternative for TradFi, blockchain gaming caters to retail masses, onboarding millions of users to crypto through incentives and fun gameplay. The greatest success story in Web3 gaming thus far has been, without a doubt, Axie Infinity. Apart from creating an engaged community whose early adopters also experienced rags-to-riches stories, it kickstarted an entire movement around play-to-earn gaming. Many have tried copying it, yet most of them failed. Axie Infinity managed to design a sustainable economy that combined NFTs and fungible tokens. The result was the first gamified crypto mining event, at scale. In order to accommodate such a massive demand, in a time when L2 rollups were still in R&D, Sky Mavis founded Ronin, a gaming-oriented Ethereum sidechain. The community that formed around Axie Infinity created a tremendous network effect, solidifying Ronin’s PMF as a gaming powerhouse. Before long, many up-and-coming titles migrated to Ronin, and the growth effects in all their key metrics (i.e. DAUs, transactions, revenue, etc.) further fuelled the flywheel.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.
Solana needs no introduction. Ever since its inception, it pushed throughput scaling on a single chain, without the need of sharding or rollups. Despite its ups and downs that culminated at the bottom of the bear market after the FTX crash, it managed to not only survive, but build a vibrant community around crypto's (arguably) most prominent PMF (thus far).
Join us for a fascinating discussion and learn about Anatoly's take on controversial topics such as MEV, concurrent block leaders (the equivalent of Ethereum's PBS proposal), L2 rollups, Solana economics, how to tackle potential exploits and more.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Martin Köppelmann.
Bitcoin’s security and reliability as a store of value are undeniable. However, its liquidity remained untapped for too long due to a lack of trustless bridges and native smart contract capabilities. As BTC is only native to Bitcoin’s L1, any attempt to include it in DeFi relies on the trust assumptions of third party custodians that wrap it. Build On Bitcoin (BOB) aims to expand Bitcoin’s functionality by integrating it with Ethereum’s smart contract capabilities. BOB operates as an OP Stack L2 with a hybrid design incorporating ZKPs, Bitcoin staking, and Ethereum for data availability. By functioning as a rollup, BOB processes transactions off-chain and batches them for settlement on Bitcoin and Ethereum, significantly improving transaction speed and reducing costs compared to Bitcoin’s base layer.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.
In the digital networked age, people’s attention often overlooks local problems in favour of global ones, which don’t necessarily impact them in their daily lives, or over which they don’t have a say due to the skewed Pareto distribution of power in modern day societies. Puja Ohlhaver, in her recent research paper ‘Community currencies’, proposes a dual-currency model that prices attention and influence in each community, with the ultimate goal of creating a Gaussian distribution of power, either locally, or globally through the dynamic interaction of multiple local communities. This model allows community members to stake their currency to earn non-transferable governance rights, creating a substrate for decentralised societal coordination that favours social innovation.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
Even though current LLM providers usually charge flat rates regardless if the subscriber is a ‘power user’ or not, as AI agents become the workhorses of the online economy, a dynamic AI-to-AI payments infrastructure would prove crucial for proper remuneration. Nevermined proposes a blockchain-agnostic, AI-agnostic credit system, that each builder can use to implement custom pricing strategies for their users. As the next trillion transactions will be mostly performed by AI agents, a universal payment system would help streamline integrations and economic interactions.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
As more and more protocols compete for marketshare, user acquisition represents one of the most important elements of the GTM strategy. Web3 projects, through their governance tokens, can incentivise users directly to participate in meaningful activities for each protocol, subsidising their revenue generation through vested upside in the project. Turtle Club built the first distribution protocol of Web3, helping its users maximise their rewards they get for meaningful on-chain activities that help bootstrap projects.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.
As online content becomes predominantly AI-driven, intellectual property (IP) rights should not be neglected as (human) creators will heavily rely on them. While the main use cases for blockchains revolve around financial applications, one could argue that our everyday lives constantly intersect IPs in different forms. Although the legal framework is abundant, proper recording, monetization and disputes are often a burden for independent creators. Story Protocol aims to create a decentralised framework for IP management, tokenizing it both through NFTs and fungible tokens, allowing creators to register fully programmable IP, that is also recognized and enforced through the traditional judiciary system. Using smart contracts and programmable metadata, Story Protocol ensures proper monetization for creators whenever their IP is used.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
While AMMs (automated market makers) represent a DeFi innovation in themselves, research and experimentation have pushed the possibilities well beyond the limitations of the classic x*y=k constant product formula originally used by LPs. One of the main innovators in this field remains Balancer - from multi-token pools with different weights replicating TradFi indices, to dynamic ratios that can be changed under certain conditions preventing further imbalances, Balancer set in place user protection measures. With the recent release of Balancer V3, developers get more freedom to experiment with AMMs, introducing features such as hooks that enable limitless pool customisation, boosted pools that combine LP fees with yield farming from money markets, and many more.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
Kiln operates as a staking-as-a-service platform, primarily focused on Ethereum, enabling users to stake assets programmatically, managing validators, rewards, and commissions through an API-first approach. In addition, it offers white-label solutions that allow institutional clients to integrate staking functionalities into their own offerings, with unified API for all assets and rewards, making it easier for businesses to provide staking services without developing the infrastructure themselves. With more than $13bn worth of assets secured, Kiln has proven its reliability, having no slashing events thus far. Moreover, Kiln widget offers a no-code experience for launching custom earn options, integrated with every major wallet and custodian.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
Throughout the years, there were many attempts of tapping into Bitcoin’s liquidity and security, but almost all of them came with different caveats. Most notably, wrapped BTC (wBTC) depended on the wrapper contract security. However, the recent surge in research and development for native solutions has led to breakthroughs previously thought impossible. Babylon launched native BTC staking and plans to further expand this to secure other blockchains, in a model similar to that of mesh security. This would not only help secure other networks, but it would also unlock liquidity from the mother chain through liquid staking derivatives.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sebastien Couture.
The DeFi landscape has significantly evolved since 2018 when Chainlink was launched. Recent developments such as L2 rollups, liquid staking, restaking and the rise of BTC DeFi have created huge demand for more customizable, modular oracles that would be able to provide accurate data for countless use cases, crosschain. RedStone set out to do exactly that and are now securing over $6.6 bn worth of assets (1000+ assets), across more than 60 chains, without a single mispricing event.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.
Traditional KYC and AML regulations have often forced companies to comply, without having the right tools to do so. Simply storing users’ personal information led to the creation of security honeypots which haven’t gone unnoticed by hackers. Web3 solutions like Privado ID aim to cryptographically prove certain traits from a user’s personal data, without disclosing it to the enquirer. This is usually made possible through zero knowledge proofs which allow users to store their personal data on their own device and only exchange verifiable credentials with trusted issuers. City of Buenos Aires has adopted a similar implementation through their Quark ID system, a digital trust framework that creates a new digital identity system, giving people control over their information.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
One of the most limited blockchain resources is blockspace. From Bitcoin’s Blocksize Wars to Ethereum’s scaling roadmap, a common denominator seems to have emerged in the form of rollups. Advancements in zero knowledge proofs have enabled trustless bridges, which are a cornerstone to onboarding liquidity to any blockchain. Furthermore, Celestia’s modular approach to blockchain architecture and their recent commitment to gigabyte blocks of data availability marked the beginning of commoditization for rollups. Abundance is the first rollup-as-a-service platform that is able to scale to 1 gigagas/second throughput, finally bringing off-chain applications, on-chain.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
The status quo for developers choosing an ecosystem for their blockchain usually revolves around trade-offs: do they go for Ethereum’s network effect, liquidity and decentralisation, or sacrifice some features in favour of a higher throughput. Monad aims to combine the best of both worlds, while not being limited by excessive hardware requirements. Monad built an EVM-compatible L1 from the ground up, completely rethinking execution and consensus, in order to achieve the infamous 10,000 TPS. This extreme scalability is made possible through Monad’s optimistic parallel execution which is asynchronous from consensus. The latter has also been optimized in order to achieve single-slot finality. Monad’s proprietary database architecture allows for states to be stored on SSDs instead of RAM, which ensures that consumer-grade hardware can run a Monad node, further increasing decentralisation.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.
Polynomials are quintessential in machine learning for establishing relationships between outputs and inputs. However, there is also a field in cryptography which could not be made possible without polynomials - zero-knowledge technology. In zero-knowledge proof systems, computations are often represented as arithmetic circuits, and these circuits are translated into polynomials. This process is crucial for generating proofs that can demonstrate the correctness of computations without revealing the underlying data. The involved complexity explains the massive adoption hurdle for zk rollups compared to optimistic ones. Succinct aims to simplify the use of zero-knowledge proofs by providing a zkVM (SP1) that allows code written in languages like Rust to be proven in a privacy-preserving way. By doing so, it aims to lower the barrier to implementing zk-rollups and increase their adoption.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
Bitcoin’s Taproot update paved the way for a new & exciting era for Bitcoin, as it expanded its use case far beyond that of an immutable ledger. However, Ordinals, BRC-20 tokens and, more recently, Runes, have limited functionality compared to what DeFi is capable of, on other smart contract blockchains. BitcoinOS envisions a revolutionary Bitcoin economy that stems from truly programmable tokens, unlocking staking, governance and many other use cases. Using BitSNARK and Grail, BitcoinOS enables Bitcoin “rollups”, which act as execution environments that use BTC as gas fee and inherit security from the L1. The missing link was always a trustless bridge between Bitcoin L1 and any potential L2. And Grail Bridge achieved just that - using zero knowledge cryptography, BTC could be transferred to other chains without relying on other custodians’ trust assumptions. In that sense, Bitcoin block #853626 is historically meaningful as it contains the first-ever onchain verification of a zero knowledge proof, on Bitcoin. A truly programmable smart contract operating system on Bitcoin was no longer a mere concept…it became a reality through BitcoinOS.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture.
Bootstrapping and maintaining a validator set can be a challenging endeavour, especially for projects that are in search of a product market fit. However, this does not mean one should abandon the ethos of decentralisation in favour of a more streamlined centralised approach. The notion of shared security had been previously explored in the Cosmos ecosystem, but Symbiotic takes it a step further, making it readily available for any project, regardless of its native blockchain, through restaking. Symbiotic is a modular coordination layer that sources node operators and economic security in a maximally capital-efficient manner.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.
A smart contract’s rigid rule system represents a double-edged sword. ‘The Code is Law’, but what happens when rogue large language models or AI agents bend the Law? Can smart contracts be weaponised to serve a criminal agenda? In his ‘Oracle’ novel, Ari Juels explores this thesis and issues an eery warning regarding the blockchain x AI intersection. In this imminent future, oracles play a crucial role, allowing LLMs to push data on-chain or smart contracts to pull off-chain data.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.
Bitcoin’s lack of native programmability, coupled with advancements in zero knowledge cryptography, has led to rollups being explored as a substitute for an execution layer. Citrea’s approach involves using Bitcoin as a data availability & settlement layer for their zero knowledge rollup. These rollups not only lower transaction costs, but they also enable smart contracts to use Bitcoin’s L1 security and further incentivise miners to secure the chain despite halving rewards. In order to inherit Bitcoin’s security, zk proofs are inscribed in Bitcoin blocks.
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This episode is hosted by Felix Lutsch.
Inspired by Cosmos’ IBC ethos, Anoma takes interoperability a step further, from VM (virtual machine) to IM (intent machine). While traditional dApps that run on virtual machines require step-by-step instructions to achieve a desired outcome, Anoma’s universal intent machine design allows users to simply define their end-results which are then aggregated and an optimal combination of intents is selected - cross-chain, simple, elegant. Moreover, intents also enable on-chain privacy, a concept explored by Namada.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.
In a world where everyone chases every basis point of marginal return, core values are often overlooked. The emergence of liquid staking protocols made stake delegation a norm rather than an exception. The hassles of running their own node and dealing with slashing risks were often too much of a burden for regular users. Dappnode offers both hardware and open-source software solutions for home stakers which are as facile to implement as a plug-n-play device. Their newly released Dappnode Smooth aims to offer the advantages of staking pools (via smart contracts), without centralisation risks.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
One of the best known educators in the space and OG Bitcoin maxi, Dan Held joined us to discuss his crypto journey from entrepreneur to marketing & growth specialist and why he decided to start the Asymmetric Bitcoin DeFi Fund. Although initially a contentious topic, the emergence of Ordinals revealed Bitcoin’s untapped potential, sparking tremendous interest for Bitcoin L2s and DeFi on the ‘mother chain’. Apart from bringing new utility to the highest liquidity blockchain, the new-found demand for blockspace significantly increased fees, thus incentivising miners to further secure the chain despite halving rewards.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.
From a cross-platform media company, to launching their own conference and, more recently, an advisory branch, Blockworks has seen and done it all. We couldn’t miss Permissionless III, one of the largest crypto conferences in the US, where we sat down with Jason Yanowitz to discuss emerging trends in the industry and where the attention might shift over the coming months.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture, Friederike Ernst & Sunny Aggarwal.
Outside of BTC’s cypherpunk movement, the early days of crypto were more or less barren in terms of innovation. However, this presented a huge opportunity for visionaries and angel investors to either launch or back bold projects, recognizing the potential of crypto stretching far beyond than just payments. One of them was Konstantin Lomashuk, co-founder of cyber•Fund which was a key actor in bootstrapping the cybernetic economy. Apart from early investments in Ethereum, Polkadot, Cosmos, Solana and many others, Konstantin recognized the potential threats to the core ethos of decentralisation and also co-founded Lido DAO in order to stave off Ethereum’s centralization risks.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.
As Ethereum’s roadmap shifted to a rollup-centric approach, a plethora of rollups have been launched, to the point where L3s have been conceptualized. Celestia sits at the forefront of modularity as it aims to replace the monolithic blockchain architecture with specialized layers that are more suited for scalability and customization. As a result, Celestia strictly focuses on data availability to accommodate the recent rollup expansion, as data storage represents the largest portion of fees on L2s. The Lemongrass upgrade lays the foundation for further use cases being enabled through Celestia, mainly revolving around interoperability and zk proof enabled ‘lazy bridging’.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.
Prediction markets were one of the first use cases of smart contracts, yet their popularity only recently spiked, following Polymarket’s social media spread. However, while prediction markets are generally zero-sum games, the rise of AI models trained on large datasets led to AI-powered prediction feeds and hedge funds. Crypto offers a unique array of use cases as it allows data scientists to not only share their data sets and models with complete privacy, but also access decentralised computing and model training. While Predictoor employs Ocean’s data infrastructure to run AI-powered prediction bots on lower timeframes, Numerai developed its own AI hedge fund for stocks, that recently also expanded to crypto (Numerai does not trade cryptocurrencies, and Numerai’s Hedge Fund(s) have no relation to Numerai Crypto).
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
Interoperability is the holy grail for a multi-chain future or the ‘internet of blockchains’. However, while IBC (inter-blockchain communication protocol) revolutionised permissionless cross-chain transfers, it was Skip Protocol’s Go API that took advantage of Cosmos’ infrastructure (and its numerous messaging protocols), to create an end-to-end interoperability platform, allowing developers to design seamless cross-chain user experiences.
We were joined by Sam Hart, head of product at Skip Protocol, to discuss the challenges of interoperability across Cosmos & Ethereum, and how Skip:Go API & Skip:Connect push the crosschain boundaries towards end user adoption.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
In this day and age, privacy and confidentiality are more important than ever. Advancements in the cryptographic research of zero knowledge proofs (ZKPs), fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) and multi-party computation (MPC) paved the way for computational integrity and confidential computing. While FHE allows for computation to be performed on encrypted data without the need for prior decryption, it is MPC that enables compliance with regulations (e.g. AML). Arcium aims to build a global super computer for parallelised confidential computing, powered by custom MXEs (multi-party computation execution environments).
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Felix Lutsch.
The future is multi-chain, scalable and modular. However, while Cosmos’ IBC set the standard for interoperability, Ethereum’s L2 shift revealed a huge problem of liquidity fragmentation across the many rollups fighting for market share. Polymer aims to bridge the two ecosystems and bring the best of both worlds: Ethereum’s native liquidity and Cosmos’ interoperability, through a modular framework using the OP-stack and IBC.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture.
Self-custodial wallets often represent the first point of contact for crypto users that venture away from centralised exchanges. As a result, their security and user experience should be paramount. This often explained Metamask’s first mover advantage and the users’ reluctance to change. However, as infrastructure evolves, new wallets are equipped from the get-go with features that are designed for normie adoption, such as: account abstraction, gas fee abstraction, easier on- and off-ramp, etc. Zeal was envisioned as a day-to-day wallet solution, allowing users true freedom to transact, both on-chain, as well as off-chain (i.e. real world spendings).
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
As the crypto industry matures, more sophisticated market participants become involved. As a result, risk management and hedging will evolve to levels seen in TradFi. However, regardless of the preferred market activity, when interacting with a blockchain, every actor competes for the same limited blockspace. Based on demand levels, the cost for securing that blockspace can fluctuate (in the form of miner fees for Bitcoin transactions, or gas fees for PoS blockchains). Therefore, a particular niche of power users could lower these costs by reserving blockspace in advance of elevated demand levels. Alkimiya set out to build just that - a marketplace for blockspace.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.
The saying goes that knowledge is power, and this perfectly applies to blockchains due to their innate transparency and immutability. However, raw data could seem, at first, unusable. This is where analytics companies, such as Nansen, play a major role in demystifying blockchain data by labelling it. In turn, curated data holds value as it can give an edge to traders, by tracking ‘smart money’ wallets. In the age of AI, most of the heavy lifting of data analysis is performed by LLMs, but human input is equally valuable for discerning nuances and fine tuning the process.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
P.S.: Our friends from @nansen_ai have offered us 10 discount codes for 10% off on their professional and pioneer plans! If you are interested in unlocking Nansen's true power, DM us on Twitter (X - @epicenterbtc) and we'll hook you up with a code (FCFS).
In 2017, Vitalik Buterin defined the ‘Scalability Trilemma’ which consisted of 3 attributes that every blockchain had to balance depending on its intended use cases: decentralisation, scalability and security. While Ethereum sacrificed scalability in favour of security and decentralisation, others prioritised throughput over the other two. However, a solution was proposed, inspired from Web2 computer science - sharding. Despite the fact that Ethereum’s ossification and significant progress in zero knowledge research led to a shift in Ethereum’s roadmap away from execution sharding towards L2 rollups, there were other L1s that were designed from the get-go as sharded blockchains. One such example was Elrond, who implemented the beacon chain PoS consensus alongside a sharded execution layer. Their recent rebranding to MultiversX alludes to a multi-chain, interoperable ecosystem, in which sovereign chains can communicate in a similar manner to cross-shard transaction routing.
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This episode is hosted by Felix Lutsch.
Web3’s decentralisation is currently limited to smart contracts as they can be verified on-chain. However, until scalability and UX become on par with that of Web2, the only realistic way for crypto to reach mass adoption is threw off-chain dApps. This creates the premise for a security bottleneck in the form of centralised APIs used for on-chain querying. Mel Project aims to expand on-chain security and decentralisation (consensus) to off-chain apps, basically achieving off-chain composability through trustless light clients. Earendil, the backbone of their ecosystem, designed to resist ISP-level censorship, is a decentralized anonymous communication and payment network that enables autonomous applications and true P2P protocols.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.
One of the OG flag bearers for decentralisation, Gnosis initially set out to build a prediction market on Ethereum. However, unlike the vibrant ecosystem of today, the early Ethereum days were barren. As a result, Gnosis team decided to build out their own infrastructure and tooling to suit their needs. Before long, tools such as Gnosis Safe, Zodiac, etc. were quickly adopted by the entire industry. Nowadays, since the foundation has been tried and tested, Gnosis 3.0 aims to focus on improving consumer dApp UX in order to facilitate widespread adoption.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture.
We couldn’t miss EthCC 7, nor the chance to chat with Vitalik Buterin about Ethereum’s status quo as an L1 amidst the plethora of L2s competing for market share, and what challenges will most likely arise along the way (e.g. staking decentralisation).
Tune in for a captivating discussion on the importance of decentralisation as a last stand of human empowerment in the current geopolitical context and how it could positively impact AI's trajectory.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Brian Fabian Crain.
One of the bluechip DeFi projects and backbone of Ethereum liquidity markets, Aave has recently announced their V4 upgrade proposal, which aims (among others) to unify crosschain liquidity.
We were joined by Stani Kulechov, founder & CEO of Aave, to discuss the DeFi (r)evolution since ETH Lend to Aave V4, expanding to non-EVM chains and potentially even building a self-sovereign chain.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst.
It is one thing to invest in early stage companies, but to do so in a nascent industry that constantly reinvents and rediscovers itself is a whole different venture. Richard Muirhead co-founded Fabric Ventures in 2012 around the thesis of supporting the Open Economy. While at first this meant investing in Bitcoin-related projects, once Ethereum was announced, a new horizon unveiled, filled with tremendous potential. Since then, the Open Economy thesis was adapted to match technological breakthroughs, and it is now centered around artificial intelligence, distributed computing and self sovereignty (over both fungible, as well non-fungible assets).
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst.
In a world constantly torn by social division amplified by polarizing scissor statements throughout social media, Taiwan conducted a social experiment aimed at strengthening social unity while also embracing diversity. Plurality details how Taiwan’s Digital Minister Audrey Tang and her collaborators achieved inclusive, technology-fueled growth that harnessed digital tools to provide an antidote to information chaos and warfare. The open-source book is living proof that present global challenges can be solved through democratic solutions that embody a decentralised ethos.
We were joined by Audrey Tang and Glen Weyl, co-authors of Plurality, to discuss the social dynamics they studied and how technology can be used to unite rather than divide.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
As more and more L2s launch promising to scale Ethereum, they end up competing for the same market share, userbase and liquidity. Apart from this harsh reality, crosschain interactions should be as seamless as possible in order to bridge different L2 ecosystems. Polygon envisions a scalable future in which various zero knowledge rollups post their proofs on an aggregation layer before settling on Ethereum, thus lowering latency and transaction costs as crosschain interactions take place expeditiously, without involving the L1 mainnet.
We were joined by Sandeep Nailwal & Brendan Farmer, to discuss Polygon’s aggregation layer and how it aims to solve the current fragmentation of Ethereum L2 scaling solutions.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
In a world where a handful of (centralised) entities hold the majority of staked Ethereum (either directly or via delegation), the network’s decentralisation and security might be in peril. While there are multiple proposals being discussed to address this pressing matter, from reducing issuance after a certain breakpoint (~30% of total ETH being staked) to introducing more severe slashing for colluding entities, education and guidance remain paramount. EthStaker is a community led project whose goal is to guide, educate, support and offer resources for stakers, in order to lower the barrier of entry for solo stakers.
We were joined by Superphiz & Nixorokish, to discuss the current Ethereum staking landscape and what challenges need to be addressed to ensure the network’s decentralisation and security.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
One could argue that psychedelic research has experienced a similar journey as crypto, in the sense that decentralised communities bound together to fund research where centralised entities refuse to do so. One of the greatest hurdles in modern science is access to research funding, and DeSci aims to provide a solution through decentralised crowdfunding. In addition, IP rights are incontestably attributed with the help of blockchain technology, as they cannot be altered at a later date. However, as the human mind is unique and moulded by each individual’s life story, establishing a causal relationship between consumption and their beneficial or detrimental effects can be extremely biased.
We were joined by Dima Buterin & Paul Kohlhaas, to discuss the vast subject of psychedelics (especially in relationship to trauma), how research has progressed and how decentralisation pushes the field forward (DeSci).
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.
The approval of Ethereum spot ETFs sent shockwaves through the industry as policymakers pivoted abruptly from threatening to veto FIT21 bill, to a pro-crypto discourse. One could say their hand was forced by the imminent US elections, but Ethereum is now officially classified as a commodity, nonetheless. As the regulatory hurdle seems, for the time being, surpassed, one should not forget the values promoted by the crypto movement from the get-go: decentralisation and permissionlessness. However, everyday users tend to overlook these aspects in favour of a more streamlined user experience. As technology evolves and scaling solutions mature, better UI & UX represent crucial goals in the race for end user adoption.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst and Brian Fabian Crain.
The massive success of the recently approved spot Bitcoin ETF showed tremendous interest from large institutional players. Even despite negative takes in public appearances, behind the curtain, more and more ‘smart money’ accumulate $BTC, either directly or through ETF shares. The same is to be expected for Ethereum, yet uncertainty still looms due to its proof-of-stake consensus model and, ultimately, staking yield. While crypto natives quickly embraced both ETH staking as well as liquid staking, institutions could not justify the higher risk profile and lack of regulatory compliance. Alluvial and Liquid Collective seek to change this and provide ultrasound infrastructure for enterprise-grade security in liquid staking.
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This episode is hosted by Felix Lutsch.
5 years, 20 Grants, 3715 projects crowd-funded and over $60M raised towards public goods funding, from 4.2M unique donations. Gitcoin’s headline numbers are indicative of the massive success their quadratic funding (QF) and public goods funding models (PGF) have seen over the years. With Gitcoin 2.0, crowd-funding is further decentralised, Allo Protocol being open-source and permissionless: any ecosystem treasury can create their own Gitcoin Grants program to help their community fund what matters to them.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
The initial scaling roadmap for Ethereum featured execution layer sharding. However, the rapid advancements of layer 2 scaling solutions in general, and zero knowledge proofs in particular, caused a restructuring of the original plan. The reason was that rollups would have required less changes made to Ethereum’s base layer, hence lower risks. On the other hand, Near Protocol was designed from the ground up as a sharded system, capable of withstanding billions of transactions simultaneously, without sacrificing decentralisation or security.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy.
Long regarded as an impending black swan, Tether has successfully weathered out the contagion and bank runs caused by Luna’s collapse in the depths of the 2022-2023 bearmarket. Since then, a large portion of Tether’s reserves has been shifted to treasury bills, which are the closest dollar proxy, positioning Tether among the top 20 holders of T-bills, worldwide. However, navigating the Tether FUD was not the first rodeo for Paolo Ardoino, as he has also previously led Bitfinex, which successfully recovered after a $72M hack, back in 2016. The worldwide adoption of USDT, especially in emerging markets and developing economies, serves as a testament to Tether’s commitment to create a product with tangible real-life applications.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Friederike Ernst.
What started out as a plan to build prediction markets, Gnosis ended up building crucial Ethereum infrastructure and tooling. Safe is one of its many successes, which originated during the 2017 ICO mania, as a solution for managing the raised capital securely, via a multi-sig. Even back then, the multi-sig model was quickly adopted by the entire industry, as a gold standard for asset security. Smart accounts and ERC-4337 represent the next step towards mass-adoption, through achieving a Web2-like UX.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture.
One of the most important hurdles to mass adoption is represented by blockchain scalability, which also hinders the real-life utility of its numerous applications. While there are different solutions being experimented with, one should not overlook the importance of security and decentralisation. Saga introduces the concept of chainlets, interoperable Cosmos-based sovereign blockchains that share the security of Saga’s mainnet validator set. The majority of their parameters are fully customisable, allowing developers to tweak them towards their own needs. Saga’s main focus is building their very own Web3 gaming ecosystem, providing game devs the scaling needed to unlock their full potential and creativity.
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This episode is hosted by Felix Lutsch.
Classical, monolithic blockchains are inherently limited in their throughput due to their single-thread execution architecture. Modern VMs attempt to solve this issue through parallelisation being implemented from the get-go. Movement Labs employs the Move-VM to build a ZK L2 rollups on Ethereum, thus also deriving its security. Through parallel execution threads, Movement achieves a theoretical TPS of 160,000 while also ensuring sub-cent transaction fees.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst.
Market makers help create more efficient markets and liquid order books, by positioning themselves on the receiving end of a trade that other market participants are unwilling to fill. Quantitative analysis is crucial in determining their position and size. Wintermute defines itself as a tech-first company that also became one of the largest spot market making firms in Web3. From angel investing in Web2, to market making in Web3, Yoann Turpin (co-founder of Wintermute) has a vast experience in both tech products & financial markets. He shares what differentiates good traders and how he approaches investing, trading and market making.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.
Credit is a widely used term, which could essentially be summarised as “more capital so you can do whatever you want”. In DeFi, there are numerous ways of getting exposure to an asset in a leveraged manner: from looping to perpetuals and margin trading, the possibilities are endless (especially when you also account for synthetic versions). Gearbox Protocol aims to create a universal, composable, on-chain ‘credit layer’, through credit account abstraction. This approach simultaneously addresses three concerns: liquidity, security and, ultimately, user experience (UX).
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy.
While large language models (LLMs) are rather passive from an economic perspective on their own, AI agents offer a preview of what truly autonomous AI applications can achieve. Fetch.ai aims to create a platform for economic interactions in the AI economy, where participants can provide many different kinds of stake, ranging from purely financial, in the form of cryptocurrency tokens, to utility based, in the form of data sets that LLMs can be trained on. It thus creates a supply chain that links different actors of the AI economy.
We were joined by Humayun Sheikh, co-founder & CEO of Fetch.ai, to discuss AI economic models and how LLMs can be integrated by agentic systems as a foundation for autonomous AI apps.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/539
As technology progresses, infrastructure should be commoditised, especially in Web3, in order to avoid the creation of bottlenecks and gatekeepers. Blockchains are naturally oblivious to off-chain data, so they need oracles to fetch data. However, given their past technical limitations, oracles have failed to provide a decentralised and permissionless framework for data query. SEDA seeks to change this by creating an intent-based modular data layer, which brings off-chain data on-chain, in order for it to be available to any party, regardless of who requested it first.
We were joined by Jasper De Goojier, co-founder of SEDA Protocol, to discuss the oracle landscape and how SEDA aims to decentralise it and make data access permissionless.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/538
Blockchains are, by default, public ledgers containing every transaction recorded by the network. While this ensures transparency, it also violates users’ privacy once an address is linked to an entity. Apart from creating additional risk for self-custody, institutions are also limited by what they can publicly share on a blockchain. As a result, there is great demand and utility for on-chain, compliant privacy, which still requires KYC (& KYT), but protects them through cryptographic constructs. Zero knowledge proofs attest computational integrity, allowing for transactions to be bundled together and their correctness verified, without revealing each individual interaction.
We were joined by Anish Mohammed, co-founder & CTO of Panther Protocol, to discuss the importance of compliant privacy for on-chain transactions, powered by zero knowledge technology.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/537
The monolithic blockchain era appears to be sunsetting. Among the first to contribute to this paradigm shift was Cosmos, which introduced the idea of specialized sovereign blockchains (appchains), made possible by the Cosmos SDK. Nowadays, the modular thesis employs external data availability and even execution solutions, which enables the creation of countless new chains. Each new blockchains comes with its own ‘specs’, and centralised RPC and node providers have to adapt to each chain’s setting. However, the saying ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’ applies in this scenario too - we have often witnessed RPC failures during high demand periods. Lava Network aims to provide a competitive marketplace for RPC and node providers, which would compete based on their performance and user feedback.
We were joined by Gil and Yair to discuss Lava Network’s RPC decentralisation in the modular, multi-chain landscape.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/536
Prolonged range bound markets are a hallmark of bearmarkets and they usually end up chopping inexperienced or over leveraged traders. Customised structured products offer a solution for market participants that want to limit their downside, but also the upside, by introducing knock-outs at certain levels or triggers. Such custom options, usually with lower probabilistic chances of occurring, naturally come at a discount. This allows traders to hedge their risk, while also betting on certain outcomes or market scenarios.
We were joined by Zhiming Yang, co-founder of Orbit Markets, to discuss crypto derivatives and how TradFi expertise applies to customising structured products for crypto markets.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/535
Measuring the social impact of a charitable donation is, oftentimes, an impossible task. Founders Pledge is a non-profit organisation that aims to funnel and streamline donations from successful entrepreneurs in order to maximise their efficiency, based on data and research. Having built a network of nearly 2000 like-minded philanthropists, the vision behind Founders Pledge was to ensure transparency, unbiased assessment, ease of access and incentive alignment for its members. Despite the hurdles of running and scaling a non-profit organisation, Founders Pledge managed to stay true to its values throughout its 10 years of activity. In the end, where there’s a will, there’s a way.
We were joined by David Goldberg, founder of Founders Pledge, to discuss the landscape of charitable non-profit organisations and how data can streamline donations and maximise their social impact.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/534
We are, arguably, still early in the crypto industry, but some people were really…really early. One of them is Lefteris Karapetsas, who joined EthDev in 2014 and contributed to building the Ethereum ecosystem, since before the genesis block. His crypto journey is one for the history books, as after EthDev he joined Slock.it, right around the time of The DAO raise…and hack. Lefteris remained a core supporter of decentralisation and an active member of the Ethereum community, being involved (and delegated) in multiple projects’ governance. More recently, he founded Rotki, an open source portfolio management app that aims to preserve user privacy.
We were joined by Lefteris Karapetsas, true Ethereum OG, to discuss his 10-year long journey through the Ethereum ecosystem, from joining EthDev (pre-Devcon 0) to founding Rotki.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/533
The Autonolas stack aims to address the ‘A’ in DAO (decentralised autonomous organisation), through its Open Autonomy framework, which enables the creation of autonomous, off-chain services for crypto applications. A key component for ensuring the proper operation of these off-chain autonomous economic agents, is the consensus mechanism. The protocol is overseen by the Governatooorr, the world’s first autonomous, AI-powered governor.
We were joined by David Minarsch, co-founder of Valory, to discuss the ever-changing landscape of AI agents and how they can be used to automate crypto applications.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/532
Web2 file storage relies heavily on centralised entities, which have mostly outgrown their competitors, establishing a quasi-monopoly. The reasons for this are twofold: enormous operating costs and seamless user experience (e.g. social logins and account recovery), which, until recently, could only be solved through centralisation. Add to this the reluctance to change platforms as users need to re-upload their files, and you get an ossified user base. However, data leaks and hacks are a constant threat to users’ privacy, and indicate the disruptive potential of decentralised file storage and sharing.
We were joined by Andreas Tsamados & Vijay Krishnavanshi, co-founders of Fileverse, to discuss their decentralised file sharing solution and how they plan to disrupt the Web2 quasi-monopoly.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/531
Fully homomorphic encryption, also known as the Holy Grail of cryptography, allows for computation to be performed on encrypted data, without the need for prior decryption. Its blockchain applications would enable programmable, institutional-grade, compliant privacy. With the addition of fhEVM libraries, solidity developers don’t have to worry about the complex cryptography and only decide what layers of the UX should be private.
We were joined by Guy Itzhaki & Guy Zyskind, to discuss fully homomorphic encryption and how Fhenix plans to leverage it to build an end-to-end encrypted Ethereum L2 with compliant privacy.
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This episode is hosted by Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/530
What began as an AI company trying to seek solutions in order to pay remote (unbanked) workers, Near AI became, in 2018, Near Protocol. Its sharded design was inspired by modern database architecture and large language model (LLM) training. Near Protocol aimed to solve the scalability trilemma, through a modular approach, combining data availability sharding with stateless validation. By abstracting away archaic blockchain standards, Near basically enabled decentralised full stack development and, in terms of UX, a distributed custodial solution via chain abstraction and account aggregation.
We were joined by Illia Poloshukhin, co-founder of Near Protocol, to discuss Near’s journey, from AI company to high-throughput L1 blockchain, and how LLM training influenced the modular design choice.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy & Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/529
As Ethereum ‘merged’ to its current proof-of-stake consensus model, the steep (for retail) minimum stake of 32 ETH created a serious risk of centralisation through staking delegation to centralised entities. Lido DAO was envisioned to preserve staking decentralisation, while also providing additional value for staked ETH in the form of liquid staking tokens (LST). However, as its market share reached the first threshold of 33%, concerns have started to be voiced regarding Lido’s own risk of centralisation. Through its dual governance model where stakers can veto $LDO voters, and the upcoming implementation of distributed validator technology (DVT) and community staking module (CSM), the Lido DAO aims to preserve staking decentralisation.
We were joined by Isidoros Passadis, contributor and Master of Validators at Lido DAO, to discuss Ethereum’s current liquid staking landscape, Lido’s governance model and what steps it takes to ensure staking decentralisation.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/528
10 years ago, Adam B Levine, the host of ‘Let’s Talk Bitcoin!’, decided that it was time to encourage other voices to step onto the crypto podcast scene. Among many applicants, Sebastien and Brian were the only 2 Europeans, so Adam suggested that they teamed up in order to record the pilot episode. On December 20th 2013, Sebastien and Brian released ‘Regulation and the Future of Bitcoin’, which marked the beginning of a 10-year (and counting) long journey. The rest is history.
On this anniversary episode, our hosts were joined by special guests and friends of Epicenter, to share their favourite moments and fun stories gathered during the 10 years of epicness.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture, Brian Fabian Crain, Friederike Ernst, Meher Roy, Felix Lutsch and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/527
gnosis.ioUnlike Ethereum ‘programmable money’, Bitcoin lacks native smart contracts by design. In an attempt to expand Bitcoin past its store of value narrative, wrapper contracts provided wBTC on other chains for DeFi applications. However, wBTC does not directly represent the native asset and it is, therefore, subject to potential exploits. DLC Link introduces a novel approach, by allowing entities to self-wrap dlcBTC.
We were joined by Aki Balogh, co-founder of DLC Link, to discuss discreet log contracts, their trust assumptions and what they mean for Bitcoin’s use cases and liquidity.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/526
When it comes to NFTs and blockchain gaming, very few companies can rival with Animoca Brands’ early conviction, investment thesis and time horizon. They understood early on that community building and network effects are the core pillars for a true paradigm shift in gaming. However, culture and narratives transcend the boundaries of gaming, becoming social phenomena. Animoca’s latest undertaking, the Mocaverse, aims to unite communities in a truly open metaverse.
We were joined by Yat Siu, chairman of Animoca Brands, to discuss the importance of digital culture in our modern-day lives and how NFT ownership unlocks community building in the open metaverse.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/525
With an average block time of 5 seconds and sub-cent transaction gas fees, Celo focuses on scalability and ease of access in order to bring DeFi to those that need it the most. Celo’s vision of ensuring equal access is reflected through their mobile-first design, aiming to disrupt legacy TradFi. The upcoming transition to an L2 rollup aims to tap into Ethereum’s security, while maintaining minimal costs through Celo’s scalability and EigenLayer’s data availability solutions.
We were joined by Marek Olszewski & Rene Reinsberg to discuss Celo's mobile-first approach to building a low-fee, high-throughput blockchain with real-world applications, and their transition to an Ethereum L2.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/524
Homo- (Greek prefix meaning ‘same’); -morphic (Greek suffix meaning ‘having a specific shape/form’)
Intuitively, one could deduct that homomorphic encryption indicates that the initial data and the encrypted result (cipher) could share the same form. Based on this property, it can be inferred that computation can be performed on the encrypted data, without prior decryption. By decrypting the result, you get the same output as the computation performed on the unencrypted data. While homomorphic encryption can be either additive or multiplicative, fully homomorphic encryption supports both types of operations. Unlike ZKPs, which are proofs of computational integrity, fully homomorphic encryption allows for encrypted data computation, without revealing additional information about the original data. This could provide the missing link for ensuring private transactions on blockchains’ public ledgers.
We were joined by Rand Hindi, CEO of Zama, to discuss fully homomorphic encryption solutions, how they differ from ZKPs & MPC, and how they can be leveraged to ensure compliant programmable privacy.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/523
"The advancements of zero knowledge proving technology, hardware acceleration and proof recursion have significantly increased the efficiency of EVM-compatible zk provers. As a result, the former tradeoff in efficiency implied by EVM-compatibility is gradually improving. Translating Ethereum’s virtual machine bytecode ensures seamless scaling for applications, without the need for additional audits and security compromises.
We were joined by Ye Zhang, co-founder of Scroll, to discuss the EVM-compatible zero knowledge landscape and how Scroll aims to stay true to Ethereum’s values and community.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/522
Leading decentralised perpetual exchange, dYdX V4 recently migrated to Cosmos to build its own sovereign appchain, in order to provide its users a much better trading experience, while continuing to deliver DeFi innovations (e.g. permisionless markets). By having full control over the appchain’s parameters, the dYdX DAOs can shape the future of the protocol, starting from the very bedrock, ensuring proper distribution and incentives for the validator set. From early adopter of L2 zero knowledge proofs (STARKs), to building its own Cosmos appchain, dYdX has proven once again to be a trailblazer for new technologies.
We were joined by Charles d’Haussy, CEO of dYdX Foundation, to discuss dYdX V4’s recent migration to a Cosmos appchain and what challenges it solves in terms of: order book decentralisation, validator distribution and user experience.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/521
The very nature of Ethereum addresses, expressed as random hexadecimal character strings, represents a big hurdle for mass adoption, as they are not human-readable. ENS domains were envisioned to not only solve this and provide a seamless UX, but to also be the cornerstone of on-chain identities. However, in the current multichain landscape, a plethora of decentralised naming services arose, which led to a heterogeneous domain name pool. As a result, ENS aims to expand to L2s and non-EVM chains, attempting to provide consistency, in order to further reduce user friction and limit conflicting domain names.
We were joined by Nick Johnson, founder of ENS, to discuss the current state of decentralised naming services from a multichain and L2 perspective, and how these ultimately tie into decentralised identities.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/520
While competition fosters innovation, the proliferation of different blockchains has resulted in the fragmentation and isolation of liquidity within each ecosystem. Early attempts to address this issue primarily involved bridges and wrapped assets. Unfortunately, these solutions were often vulnerable to hacks and exploits, and the value of wrapped assets was contingent on the security of the wrapper contract, rather than the underlying asset. Cross-chain swaps of native assets hold the promise of resolving liquidity fragmentation, but numerous technological challenges must be overcome to make them as seamless as same-chain swaps.
We were joined by Simon Harman, founder of Chainflip, to discuss multi-chain liquidity fragmentation and how Chainflip’s JIT AMM (Just in Time) aims to solve this, by providing cross-chain native swaps.
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This episode is hosted by Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/519
Stablecoins represent a safe haven against crypto’s volatility, allowing participants to remain in the market, without off-ramping to fiat. While the major stablecoins are centrally issued (e.g. USDT, USDC, BUSD), there is a pressing need for an algorithmic variant or a synthetic dollar asset. (DAI is somewhere in between since approximately 50% of its collateral is USDC). After Luna’s collapse, many jumped to point out its design flaws, yet such a concept would be crucial for crypto’s decentralisation and self-sustainability. Arthur Hayes proposed an interesting concept of NAKA synthetic dollar (NUSD), backed by Bitcoin and its inverse perpetual swap short. However, yield generation on $BTC is significantly lower than that of $ETH. A sustainable yield would help balance the cases in which funding rates would be negative (a minority in crypto).
We were joined by Guy Young, co-founder of Ethena, to discuss the stablecoin landscape and their synthetic eUSD, backed by staked ETH and its inverse perpetual swap.
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This episode is hosted by Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/518
One of the best known memes in crypto is: 'Not your keys, not your coins'. This usually resurfaces whenever a (custodial) centralised exchange is hacked or goes bust altogether. Although Web3 provides the infrastructure for self custody, this often shares the fate of Pandora. Self-custody requires increased security measures, from both end-users, as well as application developers. Web3 wallets are the interface between users and decentralised applications deployed on blockchains. While Metamask still maintains the largest market share, a multitude of wallets have emerged, promising additional features and a better UX.
We were joined by Evgeny Yurtaev, co-founder & CEO of Zerion, to discuss the challenges of building a Web3 wallet and how Zerion aims to improve user experience, while still maintaining security.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/517
Back in 2017, there was no DeFi as we know it today, yet MakerDAO were already envisioning and building towards what they thought to be a certainty. The backbone of DeFi is represented by stable coins, and MakerDAO quickly understood this: they set out to build a decentralised stable coin, $DAI (and its precursor $SAI). Being collateral-backed, the smart contract needs to know the value of that collateral, but any off-chain price data is not readily available on-chain. This is where oracles come in and provide data feeds on-chain. MakerDAO’s internal oracle has been active since 2017 on Ethereum and has recently branched out, forming Chronicle. By using aggregated Schnorr signatures, Chronicle solves the problem of oracle cost-efficient scaling.
We were joined by Niklas Kunkel, founder of Chronicle, to discuss the challenges and tradeoffs that oracles regularly face, and how Chronicle is solving them, continuing the ethos of early MakerDAO.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/516
Data immutability and transparency are key features that define a blockchain’s public ledger. However, while transactions are indeed transparent, information surrounding the blockchain’s infrastructure layer is not readily available. Since Ethereum’s Merge to PoS and the introduction of staking delegation, actionable data on the validator and client status quos became crucial for the wellbeing of the network. Rated Network aims to build a reliable ‘reputation system for machines’ forming the infrastructure layer, through better data curation and improved transparency.
We were joined by Elias Simos, founder of Rated Network, to discuss data interpretation in blockchain infra and what conclusions can be drawn about validator performance, client diversity & much more.
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This episode is hosted by Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/515
Zero knowledge proof systems have found tremendous cryptographic utility in scaling blockchains, due to their ability to prove computational integrity, succinctly. However, despite recent advancements in ZKP R&D, their construction still requires special prover circuits. Their complexity is what gatekeeps zero knowledge technology to a select few astute teams. =nil; Foundation aims to challenge this status quo by providing an alternative through their zkLLVM circuit compiler and zk proof marketplace. By commoditising the production of custom proofs, =nil; Foundation unlocks an entire new range of applications employing zero knowledge technology.
We were joined by Misha Komarov, co-founder of =nil; Foundation, to discuss the use cases and challenges of building the first marketplace for (outsourced) zero knowledge proofs.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/514
Apart from its numerous financial applications, blockchain technology could also disrupt the gaming industry, causing a paradigm shift towards true digital ownership, one that would create new incentive models for both players, as well as developers. Up until recently, technological barriers seemed cumbersome for most game developers, but the advancements of layer 2 scaling solutions made on-chain integrations viable. Immutable set out to create an all-in-one platform for developers, empowering them to create a lush gaming ecosystem to seamlessly onboard Web2 players.
We were joined by Robbie Ferguson, co-founder of Immutable, to discuss the state of Web3 gaming and Immutable's contribution to this paradigm shift.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/511
Social media revolves around content creation, and while the content itself could be tokenised through NFTs, SocialFi aims to take it a step further. The recently released friend.tech app went to show that users might be interested in something more than just content - creator shares. This implicitly links back to handles and profiles, and we can slowly start to unveil the primitives of social media. Lens Protocol predates the friend.tech venture, in both timeline, as well as scope. While social media became synonymous with monopolistic central entities, Lens Protocol aims to build the decentralised bedrock for Web3’s social layer. These primitives would not only be interoperable with any Web3 application, but they would redefine content creation, feed generation and monetisation.
We were joined by Stani Kulechov, founder of Lens Protocol & Aave, to discuss decentralised social graphs and how to leverage smart contracts to build the primitives for Web3's social layer.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/512
The maximal extractable value (MEV) problem, if left unchecked, could represent an existential threat to Ethereum’s core values. One might argue that it is a natural result of solving market inefficiencies, but it entices to centralisation and collusion in order to extract the highest amount of value. Additionally, through front-running and back-running, it creates unnecessary overhead, which caused up to 2.4% of the total network congestion back in DeFi summer of 2020 (according to Flashbots’ research). As current infrastructure cannot eliminate MEV altogether, Flashbots and other research groups have tried to come up with solutions to address its aftermath.
We were joined by Stephane Gosselin, co-founder of Flashbots and Frontier Research, to discuss the MEV landscape, what research breakthroughs have been recorded and how they impact DevEx and UX.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/511
From the very beginning, Cosmos set out to provide an alternative to the monolithic blockchain architecture proposed by Ethereum. Cosmos SDK was the cornerstone of this vision, as it allowed developers to spin up blockchains effortlessly. Its modularity enabled custom, self-sovereign chains to become a reality. And, instead of being a jack of all trades, those chains were centred around a sole purpose, thus transforming them into appchains. In turn, as the ecosystem grew, appchains had to be interoperable with one another, but this was already a core feature of Cosmos, via IBC. Before Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap, appchains were thought to be a much-needed scaling solution. However, with the advancements of zero knowledge technology, the Cosmos SDK now faces another set of challenges as it navigates the market demand for L2 scaling solutions.
We were joined by Marko Baricevic, Cosmos SDK product lead, to discuss the development philosophy behind the Cosmos Hub and how appchains evolved over time.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy & Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/510
What started out as Matic Network, in 2017, and later rebranded to Polygon, in 2021, it is now facing another major milestone: Polygon 2.0. Apart from a tokenomics update, their plans include building an aggregation layer for every scaling solution that will settle on Ethereum. This will not only provide crucial rollup interoperability, but it will also further offload Ethereum by recursively combining multiple proofs into a single one.
We were joined by Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon, for a fascinating discussion on Polygon’s future revamp, their views on infrastructure decentralisation and interoperability.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy & Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/509
After a 2021 frothy bull market, NFTs are currently experiencing the depression phase of the market cycle. However, despite the fact that only NFT art has truly found its product-market fit, NFTs in general represented the consumerist moment for crypto. In addition, they also provided a solution for tokenising real world assets (RWA) and intangibles, potentially penetrating markets worth hundreds of trillions of dollars. Moreover, similar to digital art, the advent of AI poses a challenge when it comes to establishing provenance, but this represents another utility for NFTs, as they can be traced back to their origin, given the public nature of blockchains.
We were joined by Stephen Young and Storm from NFTFi, to discuss the general state of the NFT market, future prospects for NFT development and how their P2P NFT lending platform unlocks new sources of liquidity in this bear market.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/508
Ethereum scaling solutions often resort to tradeoffs, sacrificing security or decentralisation in favour of scalability. However, zk rollups hold the potential of increasing throughput, while also inheriting the layer 1’s security. This is achieved through zero knowledge validity proofs, which are published on Ethereum mainnet. The final hurdle remains the sequencer decentralisation. zkSync was designed around EVM-compatibility, offering custom scaling solutions through its hyperchain architecture.
We were joined by Alex Gluchowski, co-founder & CEO of Matter Labs, to discuss the zk rollup landscape, its bottlenecks, and what makes zkSync stand apart as the most popular rollup.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy & Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/507
The recent history of L2s has shown that there doesn’t need to be ‘one chain to rule them all’ or an ‘ETH killer’. Instead, a healthier approach would be to find the best solution for a specific need, taking into consideration any potential tradeoffs. Avalanche has done just that, focusing from the get-go on delivering high transaction throughput, using their unique subnet architecture, consensus protocol and warp messaging. HyperSDK continues this conviction, offering a framework for developers to spin up customisable, high performance virtual machines.
We were joined by Patrick O’Grady, VP of Engineering at Ava Labs, to discuss HyperSDK and how it enables building customisable, high performance VMs on Avalanche subnets.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy & Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/506
We couldn’t miss EthCC 6 and we got to sit down with Vitalik Buterin to discuss hot topics from the Ethereum ecosystem: MEV, staking derivatives, privacy, decentralisation and future interoperability. Ethereum’s merge to proof-of-stake brought with it the emergence of liquid staking derivatives (LSD). Similarly to mining pools in proof-of-work consensus models, staking pools could pose a risk to Ethereum’s decentralisation. In terms of privacy preserving solutions, the advances in zero knowledge research were a big breakthrough, especially as EVM-compatibility became possible. Maximal extractable value (MEV) remains a pressing matter, but hopes are that the upcoming proposer-builder separation (PBS) will alleviate it.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture, Friederike Ernst & Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/505
Blockchains are secured through the economic incentives offered to their validators/miners. The more robust the network effect among validators, the more difficult it is for that blockchain to be compromised. However, building a truly decentralised and reliable validator set is not a trivial task. As a result, hub and spoke ecosystem designs like Cosmos’ (and even Polkadot’s), aim to share the main hub’s validator set and security to their ‘consumer’ chains (parachains in Polkadot’s case). Neutron relies on interchain queries, interchain accounts and interchain (replicated) security to deliver the most secure CosmWasm smart contract platform in the Cosmos ecosystem.
We were joined by Avril Dutheil, GM at Neutron, to discuss Neutron’s smart contract platform and how it leverages replicated security (ICS) and interchain accounts (ICA).
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This episode is hosted by Felix Lutsch & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/504
Stablecoins represent the backbone of DeFi, allowing complex financial applications to be protected from external volatility. From fiat-backed to algorithmic, there are multiple approaches to issuing and backing stablecoins. While US regulations are looming over the crypto industry, Monerium released a fully regulated on-chain euro stablecoin, the EURe, enabling direct SEPA transfers, on- and off-ramp.
We were joined by Sveinn Valfells, CEO of Monerium, to discuss the European E-Money Directive and how it set the ground for fully regulated on-chain currencies (EURe) built on top of SEPA.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/503
Layer 2 zero knowledge roll-ups have initially been used for achieving private transactions on blockchains. However, past simple transfers, interacting with a public smart contract posed a serious challenge. As research and technology evolved, proof construction became much more efficient, enabling zk-powered scalability. There is a variety of pros and cons for each type of proof system, but given the impending rise of qunatum computers, we have witnessed a recent migration from SNARKs to STARKs. While the former relies on trusted setups, zk-STARKs are quantum-resistant.
We were joined by Eli Ben-Sasson, co-founder of Starkware, to discuss Starknet's layer 2 architecture, as well as the upcoming update to Cairo 1.0 and how it will impact scalability performances for STARKs.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/502
As institutional money set their eyes on crypto, some degree of centralisation and regulation was inevitable. However, the key aspect is to limit it to access gateways and not affect protocols’ decentralisation. Recent events have shown that price manipulation is easily achieved in conditions of low liquidity, hence regulated fiat on- and off-ramps will, in the end, also benefit retail consumers. It once again all boils down to achieving these goals while maintaining privacy for users and ensuring that regulations will not stifle innovation.
We were joined by Luka Müller, co-founder of MME Legal Firm & Sygnum Bank, to discuss about crypto regulations, institutional investors, user privacy & CBDCs.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/501
As Epicenter hits the 500 episode milestone, our hosts look back on almost 10 years of crypto developments, analysing the good, the bad and the ugly. What projects & narratives have surprised our hosts? Has Bitcoin failed in becoming a reliable store of value? Will ZK proofs provide the much needed solution to AI’s alignment problem? Last but not least, are we still early? Get ready for a fascinating discussion, albeit gloomy for this special occasion.
Thank you for being part of this amazing journey! We wouldn’t have made it so far without your continuous support! Looking forward to the next 500 episodes!
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture, Brian Fabian Crain, Friederike Ernst, Meher Roy, Sunny Aggarwal & Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: [epicenter.tv/500](https://epicenter.tv/500)
In order to achieve true transaction privacy, it is not enough to encrypt or build ZK proofs for transaction bundles, as long as the underlying blockchain uses an account-based model. Aztec is building a ZKVM that superposes an UTXO model, so that balances are constantly updated as new, untraceable, log entries. The upcoming Aztec 3 aims to enable privacy-preserving smart contracts, using a hybrid, multi-layered rollup. This approach allows for both public and private smart contracts to be executed simultaneously.
We were joined by Zac Williamson & Joe Andrews, to discuss the evolution of Aztec, from ZK Money to their upcoming privacy-preserving hybrid ZK rollup.
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This episode is hosted by Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/499
As crypto evolves, it becomes clearer that the future will be multi-chain. Presently, moving funds between different blockchains is frustrating...to say the least. The current bridging solutions are prohibitive from a UX perspective, mainly due to how finality is reached across different blockchains. This translates to long wait times and anxiety when interacting with new protocols, caused by the incertitude of funds arriving safely on the other side. Another major blockage consists of gas fees, particular to each blockchain, which often require an additional swap. But what if, users could enjoy near-instant cross-chain swaps (sub-20 second) and one-click transaction aggregators?
We were joined by Fig, co-founder of Squid Router, to discuss how they leverage Axelar's infrastructure to achieve one-click, near-instant cross-chain swaps, creating user-friendly interoperability.
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This episode is hosted by Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/498
Ethereum's merge and transition to a proof-of-stake consensus implied switching from proof-of-work mining to transactions being validated by entities that have an economic stake in the network. Proof-of-stake distributed networks are subject to complex game theory models (e.g. slashing). Distributed validator technology (DVT) enables a more modular validator stack at every level: key pairs, hardware and entities. This reduces trust dependencies and increases security for validator entities.
We were joined by Collin Myers & Oisín Kyne, founders of Obol Network, to discuss Ethereum's 2.0 PoS consensus, the current validator landscape and how distributed validator technology (DVT) allows for an increased security and overall smoother UX for validator entities.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/497
Public transaction history in blockchains represents one of their key features which, alongside immutability, aim to provide an alternative to CeFi. However, this transparency comes at a price: privacy. As a result, different solutions have been proposed, that preserve privacy while maintaining all the other benefits of blockchain technology, but there currently isn't a one-size-fits-all answer to this problem. For example, zero knowledge proofs convey the validity of a transaction batch without sharing any other details, but the underlying arithmetic circuits are both complex as well as computational intensive. Umbra proposes a system that relies completely on elliptic curve cryptography, employing multiple private-public key pairs to achieve stealth payments.
We were joined by Ben DiFrancesco, founder & CEO of ScopeLift, to talk about Umbra's privacy preserving stealth token transfer system and if the need for privacy on blockchains outweighs any implicit UX frictions.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/496
As the second Avalanche summit drew to a close, Sebastien Couture and Sunny Aggarwal sat down with Emin Gün Sirer for a fascinating conversation exploring future innovation narratives in crypto. Longtime friend of Epicenter, Ava Labs' founder and CEO shared his unique insights on the industry, from both a founder, as well as a former academia perspective.
Given Avalanche's consensus & architecture, it boasts high TPS and scalability properties, incentivising founders to build better products in the AVAX ecosystem.
One of the most controversial narratives is that of LLMs (i.e. ChatGPT) powering smart contract development by bypassing programming languages and even bytecode altogether. The question arises if replacing the human third-party with an AI fixes trust issues or not, but only time will tell which piece of code we can actually consider 'law'.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/495
When it comes to top-tier VCs, very few equal Andreessen Horowitz' (a16z) impressive portfolio, which stretches over both Web2 and Web3. Their crypto venture arm includes investments in most industry verticals, from infrastructure projects to NFTs and blockchain gaming. Constructing such a solid investment thesis requires conviction in the long-term prospects of the industry, as well as an influential network.
We were joined by Ali Yahya, GP at Andreessen Horowitz, to discuss about a16z structure, operations and investment thesis, as well as the broader crypto landscape and value proposition.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/494
The end of 2022 and beginning of 2023 were marked by centralised institutions failing: from CEXes to CeFi itself, contagion spread quickly in over-leveraged and opaque entities. Amidst this chaos, (crypto)people turned their hopes, once again, to DeFi. However, in lack of traditional enforcing mechanisms, not even battle-tested decentralised lending protocols could find a solution to provide under-collateralised loans, aka credit. Mars Protocol, with its unique hub & outposts architecture, aims to answer this need in the Cosmos ecosystem, by deploying on Osmosis and tapping into its deep liquidity. From manual leverage to credit and yield farming, Mars will feature a wide suite of DeFi products.
We were joined by Jose Macedo, founder of Delphi Labs, to discuss the history of Delphi Digital, their learnings from incubating projects and the vision behind Mars’ ‘Red Bank’ DeFi products.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/493
We often take data storage for granted, but the rise of centralised storing facilities (i.e. AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.) hangs over like Damocles’ sword. When it comes to blockchains, full nodes store that network’s complete data history. Even if storage costs are set to decrease as technology evolves, so do blockchains accumulate more data over time. An interesting solution would be to create a decentralised backup for blockchain data and Arweave is a prime candidate for it. There is but a missing link represented by uploading and validating different blockchains’ data. This is where KYVE steps in, offering a decentralised validating solution to verify uploaded blockchain data and even retrieve it from Arweave, on demand. This also extends to off-chain data, opening new possibilities for data availability and scalability.
We were joined by John Letey, founder and CTO of KYVE Network, to discuss the challenges and use cases of decentralised data storage and how blockchain interoperability could benefit from it.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/492
Building a truly decentralised, peer-to-peer network, based on a built-in identity system, limits the ecosystem’s interoperability with the outside world. Onboarding developers and users to Urbit was only the first hurdle. On-ramping crypto was a whole different & daunting task. Uqbar set out to build an execution layer on top of Urbit, enabling smart contracts, which would ultimately settle, via a ZK rollup, on Starknet.
We were joined by Tim Galebach, founder of Uqbar, to discuss the different design choices involved, from Hoon programming DevEx to a hybrid ZK-optimistic rollup.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/491
Considering the abundance of cryto projects launching constantly, making sound investment decisions requires both ample experience in the space, as well as a reliable network. Predicting future trends in such a volatile industry is a skill very few possess, especially since narratives evolve at a rapid pace. Ryan Zurrer is one of the OG participants and investors in the blockchain industry, with an experience of more than 10 years and an impressive portfolio of investments. From BTC mining to ICOs, DeFi and more recently NFTs & play-to-earn gaming (P2E), Ryan has witnessed all the major cycles in crypto.
We were joined by Ryan Zurrer, founder of Dialectic AG, to discuss about the crypto investment landscape and the evolution of the industry from BTC to P2E gaming.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/490
When it comes to scaling blockchains, there are 2 main types of off-chain solutions: sidechains and L2s (i.e. rollups, state channels). These are all intended to scale monolithic L1 blockchains. However, the core functional layers of a blockchain could also be reinvisioned as customisable building blocks. This idea led to the creation of modular blockchains, which handle execution, consensus and data availability separately from one another, thus considerably increasing throughput.
Dymension is a Cosmos modular blockchain hub that acts as settlement layer for RollApps (app-specific chains).
Sebastien was joined by Barry, Head of Product at Dymension, to discuss the advantages of developing modular blockchains, their scalability and how RollApps integrate in this environment.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/489
Scientific research & publishing are gruelling tasks that extend outside the scope of science itself. Centralised publications abound in archaic practices that span from submitting a paper to getting it peer-reviewed and finally published, process which may take even up to years. In addition, research requires funding from very early stages of pursuing an idea, all the way to its finality (i.e. clinical trial or real-life applications). In TradSci (traditional science), funding is usually obtained once progress has already been achieved or when a startup has been formed.
DeSci (decentralised science) sets out to change this paradigm by funding early stage research via DAOs. When it comes to scientific publications, peer reviewing is also decentralised and incentivised, considerably speeding up the process. Moreover, contributions can be clearly retraced, avoiding false claims over IP, and the research itself becomes much more easily accessible and disseminated.
We were joined by Vincent Weisser & Laurence Ion, stewards of Vita DAO, to discuss the advantages of DeSci in general, and the progress of longevity research in particular.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/488
While Part 1 (#486) focused on the technological advancements that allowed proofs to be generated in a practical manner, lowering both the time and the hardware requirements, in this episode, we take a closer look at the use cases of different types of zk rollups and how they could promote blockchain mass adoption. Polygon's zk EVM equivalence, coupled with low transaction fees, promise a frictionless user experience. As with all L2 rollups, sequencer decentralisation remains a pressing issue that needs to be solved.
We were joined by Jordi Baylina (tech lead) & David Schwartz (CTO) from Polygon's zkEVM, to discuss the relationship between Polygon's multiple zk rollups, their use cases, as well as network statistics for zk-EVM.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/487
With the upcoming launch of Polygon's zkEVM mainnet, L2s are undoubtedly a huge narrative that is unfolding in 2023. It is time to take a step back and recognise the incredible amount of effort that has gone into researching and building L2 scaling solutions in general and zk rollups in particular. Tech-wise, we barely scratched the surface of general purpose processors that can handle zk circuits, so there is still tremendous room to grow. As layer 2s become more efficient, so will the applications that are dependent on blockchain throughput.
We were joined by Jordi Baylina (tech lead) & David Schwartz (CTO) from Polygon's zkEVM, to discuss the different milestones & challenges they had to overcome in designing a zk rollup, from circuits to mainnet.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/486
Layer 2 scaling solutions are widely regarded as the next step forward in the mainstream adoption of crypto as they enable higher throughput and lower transaction fees. Coinbase’s recent announcement of building an optimistic rollup solution called Base is proof (no pun intended) that major centralized actors view this as an opportunity to onboard new users in a decentralized crypto economy. The following years will abound in innovation as both optimistic and zero-knowledge rollup solutions still have plenty of room to grow, but the involvement of centralized entities will act as a catalyst from a technological, as well as a regulatory standpoint.
We were joined by Jesse Pollak, Head of Protocol at Coinbase, to discuss the thesis & business model behind Base and how it will act as an interoperable bridge to onboard the next billion users on-chain.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/485
Building a blockchain from the ground-up is a daunting task in itself, one that should not be a concern when designing an end-user application. Moreover, as Web3 aims to move away from centralized vertical scalability towards a multi-chain decentralized environment, horizontal scalability and cross-communication should represent a standard. While Cosmos solves the latter, deploying application-specific blockchains has not been a streamlined process. Saga aims to address this by providing automated means of deploying application-specific blockchains, called chainlets that use the validator set of Saga. This leads to a simplified user (and developer) experience, presently much needed in the Web3 gaming and entertainment industries.
We were joined by Rebecca Liao, co-founder & CEO of Saga, to discuss bootstrapping app-specific chains in just one click, leveraging the scalability & security of Cosmos, thus allowing developers to focus more on the product and less on the blockchain infrastructure.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/484
Web3 has always been criticised for its not so friendly user experience. While one might argue that it requires a mere learning curve, similar to that of e-mail services when first introduced, Web2’s ease of use has become the norm. Account abstraction and smart contract automation are just 2 solutions for unlocking higher flexibility in transaction execution logic. These backend improvements, alongside scaling solutions and a more user-friendly frontend (e.g. wallets, interfaces) will represent the main drivers of adoption.
We were joined by Luis Schliesske & Hilmar Orth, founders of Gelato Network, to discuss about Gelato Network’s approach to decentralising Web3's backend through automation and relaying, in order to onboard the next 100 million users.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/483
The Metaverse has taken the world by storm in 2021 and even though many have and are still opposing it, the fact that we are spending the majority of our lives online is an undeniable truth. The boundaries between physical and digital worlds are slowly eroding away. Our digital presence generates a data footprint that is currently being stored in big tech’s centralized silos. As a whole, these user-generated data breadcrumbs represent our digital identity. Web3 has, so far, mainly focused on financial aspects, disregarding user specific data even though the latter actually represents the vast majority (>90%) of all generated data.
We were joined by Joel Thorstensson, co-founder of 3Box Labs, to discuss Ceramic’s goal of decentralizing ‘social’, account-based data in the form of user-generated event streams, that could unlock true application interoperability built on a composable data layer.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/482
From technological breakthrough to philosophical defiance, the topic of AI has always sparked intense debates ever since Alan Turing & John McCarthy advanced this branch of computer science. One might argue that this was caused by expectations overwhelmingly surpassing technological capabilities. However, the recent public release of ChatGPT has rekindled former sci-fi apocalyptical scenarios, even if it is (still) just a trained language model. Humanity gazed in awe as a simple input/output text interface could instantly disrupt fields such as software engineering or copywriting. Worst part? It also challenged (arguably) the most important human-specific trait: creativity (Midjourney). Data is the lifeblood of AI as it increases the model’s prediction accuracy: larger input sample translates into more outputs that help fine-tune weights during back-propagation cycles (the model ‘learns’).
We were joined by Trent McConaghy, founder & CTO at Ocean Protocol, to discuss the advantages of implementing blockchain (& NFT) technology in data management and trading, what makes a particular data set valuable and what challenges derive from AI implementations and the data digital gold rush.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/481
DeFi lending protocols operate accordingly to their smart contracts and are perfect examples of ‘Code is law’, even if some recent exploits have not quite abided to this harsh truth. From well established protocols to degenerate DeFi farms with astronomic APYs, they all mainly use liquidity pools. Morpho Labs proposes a peer-to-peer approach that operates on top of another protocol’s liquidity pool (i.e. Aave, Compound), offering better rates for lenders as well as borrowers.
We were joined by Paul Frambot, co-founder and CEO of Morpho Labs, to discuss about the benefits and challenges that arise from a peer-to-peer lender-borrower matching system and what failsafes are in place.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/480
2022 has proven time after time that centralised entities are prone to multiple points of failure, intentional or not. Decentralised finance (DeFi) addresses these, but the user experience has often been lacklustre compared to that from centralised finance (CeFi). Exchanges are the backbone of any market, but high throughput is required in order to ensure that both makers and takers can proficiently use them. Decentralised exchanges have long faced issues due to bandwidth constraints native to blockchains, but recent L2 scaling solutions have provided a considerable increase in terms of throughput. For example, dYdX is currently the largest consumer of STARKs, but growing institutional and retail interest in derivative financial products urges for an even better alternative.
We were joined by Antonio Juliano, founder & CEO of dYdX perpetual exchange, to discuss about the upcoming transition to dYdX V4 and what challenges decentralised exchanges have to face amidst technological bottlenecks and upcoming regulations.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/479
The recent advancements of layer 2 scaling solutions, especially zero-knowledge rollups, led to a complete redesign of Ethereum’s scalability roadmap. As a result, the initial concept of sharding the execution layer was abandoned and replaced by the idea of data sharding. This proposal, named after its author, is know as Danksharding. EIP-4844 is also referred to as proto-danksharding as it sets the foundation for data sharding, through the introduction of data blobs.
We were joined by Carl Beekhuizen & Trenton Van Epps from the Ethereum Foundation, to discuss about the upcoming EIP-4844 timeline and its KZG ceremony.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/478
While Part 1 (#476) focused more on the general landscape of the ZK ecosystem, covering team updates and developments, in this episode, we take a closer look at specific use cases for ZK proofs and if the focus has shifted from privacy to blockchain scalability. Moreover, as the dusk of 2022 introduced chatGPT to the world, it seems only fitting to explore ZKP integrations in machine learning (ML).
In Part 2 of this 2-part episode, we were joined by Anna Rose, host of Zero Knowledge Podcast and founder of ZK Summit, ZK Validator and ZK Hack, and Kobi Gurkan, Head of Research at Geometry, to discuss current applications for ZK proofs and what narratives are going to shape 2023 for the ZK ecosystem.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/477
Blockchains are immutable record keepers, storing information about every transaction ever recorded. However, this attribute comes at a cost: as more and more transactions occur, so does the size of the record expands. In turn, the hardware requirements for running a node increase which ultimately affects decentralization. Another aspect frequently criticized is how transactions are being processed by legacy blockchains in terms of speed. For both of these aspects there is a cryptographic solution that addresses scalability: zero knowledge proofs (ZKPs). These allow one entity (prover) to prove to another entity (verifier) that a statement is true, without revealing any additional information about the process or data involved. When applied to blockchains, ZKPs improve scalability and privacy by certifying that state transitions occurred, without the need to relay the underlying information.
In Part 1 of this 2-part episode, we were joined by Anna Rose, host of Zero Knowledge Podcast and founder of ZK Summit, ZK Validator and ZK Hack, and Kobi Gurkan, Head of Research at Geometry, to discuss the state of the ZK ecosystem and how this promising technology is evolving.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/476
When discussing the widespread adoption of true, peer-to-peer decentralization, one could easily identify various social and political obstacles. However, there is also an often overlooked technological impairment as the underlying architecture of computer networks was not designed to achieve global-scale decentralization. Ideally a complete restructuring would be necessary, from applications and programming language, to as profound as rewriting operating system kernels. This is what Urbit is trying to achieve; a decentralized network where users have full control over their computer, running a unified operating system, where applications function seamlessly, without centralized chokepoints.
We were joined by Ted Blackman, CTO of Urbit Foundation, and Gary Lieberman, the Chorus One Team Lead for Urbit, to discuss how Urbit reshapes the way we interact with computers, its current development stage, and what challenges it has to overcome.
Topics covered in this episode:
- Ted's background
- What Urbit is building
- The disruptive potential of Urbit
- Gary's motivation behind joining Urbit
- Urbit's impact on user experience
- Current development stage and potential limitations
- General timeframe for Urbit adoption
- Other use cases for Urbit
- Implications Urbit might have for crypto (synergies)
- Privacy vs. Accountability
Episode links:
- Urbit: https://bit.ly/3A9COrX
- Urbit Foundation: https://bit.ly/3G8KZXR
- Ted Blackman: https://bit.ly/3Wuqyde
- Gary Lieberman: https://bit.ly/3YJcRt6
Sponsors:
- Tally Ho: Tally Ho is a new wallet for Web3 and DeFi that sees the wallet as a public good. Think of it like a community-owned alternative to MetaMask. - https://epicenter.rocks/tallycash
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: https://epicenter.tv/475
As crypto adoption increases, so does the pressing need for blockchain scalability. Monolithic blockchains provide data availability, consensus and execution on a single, base layer, which makes scaling them a difficult endeavour. Multiple layer-2 (L2) scaling solutions have been proposed to address computation and/or data availability, but they reach the same design bottlenecks: limited bandwidth, account state models, sequential transaction processing, etc. Modular blockchains separate the core functionalities, redesigning them as customisable building blocks. This allows for greater flexibility and scalability, adapting blockchain structure to its intended function.
We were joined by Nick Dodson, CEO and co-founder of Fuel Labs, to discuss modular execution layers and how they approach different aspects of blockchain design and scalability.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/474
This year has been quite a rollercoaster for the crypto industry. From the long-awaited success of the Ethereum Merge to the spectacular collapse of FTX, this year has been full of lessons, resilience, and insights. This is also one of a few bear markets where activities and developments continue to feel vibrant across the board, while long-term adoption and regulations seem evermore uncertain.
With that backdrop, our hosts sit down for a conversation on the current state of crypto and look back on 2022. The topics range from the general public sentiment to key developments within the industry, as well as exciting themes that the hosts are looking forward to in the upcoming future. Throughout the conversation, the hosts also express concerns over the issues with privacy and regulations, and how the ecosystems can resiliently move forward.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture, Brian Fabian Crain & Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/473
Dune Analytics is a platform aggregating blockchain data, making data easier to query and understand for the larger public. Over the past years, Dune has become the go-to tool for blockchain analytics, as well as the home of a community of dune wizards numbering in the thousands, with its fundraising at a 1 Billion valuation as a testament to the growth of the project over the past 4 years.
In today's episode, we are joined by the project's co-founder, Fredrik Haga. We discuss the products Dune Analytics offers, why it's hard to aggregate data that in principle is public, and how a community of data wizards was built in a grassroots effort. We also chatted about product focus and vision for the future, as well as useful lessons for bootstrapping a project on a shoestring budget.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/472
Artificial Intelligence is a fascinating field that has made tremendous development over the past few years. From GPT-3 to Dall-e and Stable Diffusion, the vastness of the scope of applications for AI and neural computing is becoming clearer than ever. At the base layer, there is a need for decentralized p2p AI compute platform that provides flexible access to the wider public. Gensyn sets out on the mission to provide just that by building a market place protocol for AI compute - ultra-low cost, hyperscale, permissionless.
In today’s episode we are joined by the project's co-founders Ben Fielding and Harry Grieve. We take a deep dive into the current landscape for AI and AI compute, the reasonings and trade-offs in building Gensyn, the protocol’s focus and edge cases, and how the protocol is utilizing the blockchain technology as both incentive layer and credibly neutral platform.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/471
EigenLayer is a 'programmable slashing' layer2 protocol built on Ethereum which leverages security through the method of restaking. This is a bootstrapping mechanism which allows existing Eth2 stakers to access the collateral in the staking system to provide additional services, for additional yield, while taking on additional risk.
We were joined by founder Sreeram Kannan who explained to us the concept of re-staking, how this works in the EigenLayer protocol, use cases, and the roadmap ahead.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/470
For centuries, we have been led to believe that nation states are the only way to organize humankind at scale. But governments all around the world are failing to react swiftly to the severe destruction of our planet from things like war and climate change, and this is endangering our whole species.
Nation3 is ready to overturn this, by building a Web3-powered, tax-free, solarpunk sovereign cloud nation. It is structured as a DAO, meaning there is no legal entity, no gatekeepers, and no influence by trad states. The goal is to gradually build or invest in products and services that allow citizens to be actively involved in economic activity. The $NATION token serves as the gateway to participate in the community Discord, participate in governance decisions, receive an NFT passport, and eventually receive services provided by the new cloud nation.
We were joined by founders Luis and Anastasiya to chat about why they see this is as necessary for humankind, how the legal, governance and economic aspects will work, and the long term visions for the project.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/469
Wormhole is a decentralized cross chain messaging protocol powering the transfer of value and information across high value chains. A network of Guardian nodes secure the protocol by observing and attesting to events and data on its connected chains. These attestations are gossiped around the open Wormhole peer-to-peer network, allowing anyone connected to the network to observe the flow of information. Portal is a bridging app built on top of Wormhole where users can seamlessly bridge tokens and NFTs across supported chains and easily enter the network’s ecosystem.
We were joined by Dev Bharel, Developer Relations for Wormhole. He gave us great insight into how the protocol works, security assumptions and incidents, the concept of generalized messaging passaging, and the Portal Bridge as a first adopter of the Wormhole protocol. We also chatted about what else is being built on Wormhole, and how you can get involved.
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This episode is hosted by Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/468
With the long awaited Ethereum Merge successfully executed last month, we caught up with Vitalik at DevCon in Bogota to talk shop: How does he see the state of the network, does he think looming centralization is a threat. Was Ethereum's danksharding plus third party layer 2s a good architecture decision? How much of an issue is MEV?
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/467
Since its announcement a few weeks ago at Cosmoverse in Medellin, Atom 2.0 has sparked intense debate in the Cosmos community and throughout the blockchain ecosystem. It proposes three pillars for the Cosmos Hub: Interchain Security, the Interchain Allocator, and the Interchain Scheduler. However, parts of the paper have been contested and debated over fears of token holder dilution, potential treasury mismanagement, and even the collapse of the Hub. We chat with Ethan Buchman and Zaki Manian to dive deep into Atom 2.0 and its vision for Cosmos moving forward.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/466
After a 2 year hiatus, Devcon was back for its 6th and best year so far, this time in Bogota, Colombia. As things wrapped up we grabbed a few of the Ethereum community's most prominent names for a recap on the conference. Hear as we chat to Nick Johnson from ENS, Anett Rolikova from Nethermind, David Hoffmann from Bankless, and Joseph Schweitzer from the Ethereum Foundation, about their particular standouts of the event, the LatAm and wider Ethereum community, and what they see coming next for Devcon 7 and beyond.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/465
Bonus Episode: At a side event at Devcon in Bogota Colombia, Friederike moderated a panel discussion on censorship resistance and credible neutrality with Phil from Flashbots, Patrick from Infura, Sebastian from HOPR, Martin from Gnosis, and Sreeram from EigenLayer. We dove deep into what credible neutrality constitutes, whether it needs defending, and if so how we should go about it.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/B007
We caught up with Cosmoverse co-founder and YouTuber Cryptocito, for a chat from this year's event in Medellin. We look back on the 2nd edition of the conference and how the ecosystem has grown since last year. We also dive into some of the announcements, notably, ATOM 2.0.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/464
HOPR is a decentralized and incentivized peer-to-peer mixnet open to anyone who wants to join and run a node. The network allows people, companies, and devices to exchange information online with its metadata stripped. People who communicate and transact using HOPR — or apps and services which run on top of the platform — can be sure that no-one can find out what data is being shared, who is sending or receiving it, or even how much data is being sent. HOPR gets its name from the fact that it provides metadata privacy by sending data packets through multiple nodes - or “hops” – in the network. Decentralization ensures that the network is fully independent and there is no entity that can control it or intercept the traffic.
We were joined by HOPR founder Sebastian Bürgel, who chatted about the need for a platform such as this in the space, how it works by sending packets through nodes, the HOPR token, and The DecenGov DAO.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/463
Crescent is an AMM/Orderbook Hybrid Decentralized Exchange that allows trading inter-chain assets in a cost-efficient manner. Crescent is a sovereign Cosmos chain that was created after migrating the Gravity Dex from the Cosmos Hub. Crescent particularly focuses on efficient use of liquidity by giving powerful tools to market makers to use their capital and provide good prices for traders.
We were joined by the founder of Crescent Network, Hyung Lee, to chat about his involvement in the Cosmos ecosystem, B Harvest, the Gravity DEX, and combining AMMs and orderbooks. We also hear about Crescent's roadmap and future role within the ecosystem.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/462
In the countdown to the merge, Sebastien and Friederike teamed up with Eduardo Antuña, Co-founder of DappNode, at this year's Dappcon which is back after a 2 year hiatus. Hear as they chat about what the merge means for the broader Ethereum ecosystem.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/461
Decentralized stablecoins have long been regarded as a fundamental building block for the decentralized web. The first ground-breaking project in this area is Maker with their stablecoin DAI. Multiple ideas existed for how Maker should evolve and the path Maker chose was to add multiple types of collateral and rely on governance input to maintain stability. Over time, the vast majority of Maker's collateral came to be represented by USDC, a centralized stablecoin issued by regulated US institutions.
Rai Reflex Index (RAI) decided to fork Maker and choose a path favoring trust-minimization over faster scaling. Unlike with Maker, only ETH is accepted as collateral and a different mechanism is used to maintain low volatility that doesn't rely on governance input. We were joined by Reflexer Labs' co-founder Ameen Soleimani to chat about the philosophical differences to Maker, the mechanisms used to ensure the stability of RAI, the threat of regulatory intervention for DAI and how we can create truly trust-minimized stablecoins to ensure the resilience and neutrality of DeFi.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/460
DappCamp is a 21-day cohort-based course for Web2 developers making the shift to Web3. It offers hands-on experience on how to architect, develop, and scale a Web 3.0 app on Ethereum. Participants are given the opportunity to collaborate with like-minded peers to learn and build together, and also meet world-class founders who built some of the most successful apps on Ethereum to understand best practices and common pitfalls.
Preethi Kasireddy, Founder of DappCamp, started her crypto journey while at a16z and later joined Coinbase as a software engineer. After teaching herself Ethereum Dapp development during the 2017 ICO boom she built smart contracts for various crypto projects and created TruStory where she and her team built a blockchain on Cosmos. She also writes a great blog which often see her posts go viral. Preethi joined us to chat about how her journey in crypto has evolved, her love of writing, learning and teaching, why she created DappCamp, and being a woman in the crypto space.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/459
On August 8, 2022, the US Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Tornado Cash, citing allegations it helped North Korea's Lazarus hacker group launder millions of dollars worth of crypto proceeds stolen from various crypto projects over the past few years. Coin Center believe that OFAC has overstepped its legal authority by adding certain Tornado Cash smart contract addresses to the Specially Designated Nationals And Blocked Persons (SDN) List, potentially violating US Americans' constitutional rights to due process and free speech.
Peter Van Valkenburgh, Director of Research at Coin Center, joined us for an in-depth look at how OFAC operates, why he believes this sanctioning represents an overreach, what's next for Tornado Cash, and what this means for the rest of the blockchain ecosystem.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/458
CosmWasm is a smart contracting platform built for the Cosmos ecosystem. It's the Cosmos (Cosm) way of using WebAssembly (Wasm). CosmWasm is written as a module that can plug into the Cosmos SDK, meaning that anyone currently building a blockchain using the Cosmos SDK can quickly and easily add CosmWasm smart contracting support to their chain, without adjusting existing logic.
We were joined by the project's founder, Ethan Frey, for a deep dive into what WebAssembly is and the benefits of its integration with Cosmos SDK, its interaction with IBC and use cases for other cross-chain apps, and the roadmap ahead.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/457
A cashless society - one where paper and coin currency is no longer used and instead replaced with electronic transactions. Many countries are already moving in this direction with benefits noted as including lower crime rates and reduced money laundering, and of course convenience. But going cashless does have its downsides.
Brett Scott is the author of Cloudmoney, a revelatory story about the fusion of big finance and tech, which requires physical cash to be replaced by digital money or 'cloudmoney'. Diving beneath the surface of the global financial system, He uncovers a long-established lobbying infrastructure waging a covert war on cash, as banking and tech companies promote a cashless society under the banner of progress.
He joins us to dive deeper into the thesis behind his book and to share his views on how cryptocurrency and blockchain fits into this.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/456
Flashbots has pioneered the work around MEV which has become one of the most important topics in crypto today. MEV-Boost is an implementation of proposer-builder separation (PBS) built by Flashbots for proof of stake Ethereum. Validators running MEV-Boost maximize their staking reward by selling their blockspace to an open market while protecting Ethereum decentralization. It is estimated that validators running MEV-Boost can increase their staking rewards by over 60%. MEV-Boost is free, open-source, and neutral software.
Lido has become the leading liquid staking solution on Ethereum with a huge amount of stake and has also taken on a key role in shaping the future of staking on Ethereum.
We were joined by Stephane Gosselin, co-founder of Flashbots, to chat about MEV and the importance of MEV-Boost, how it works and it's impact on Ethereum. Also joining the chat is Vasiliy Shapovalov, Tech Lead at Lido, to share with us the significant impact MEV-Boost will have on Lido.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/455
An interesting question that has sparked debate in the Twittersphere and amongst our hosts. Hear as Meher, Friederike and Brian discuss scaling visions currently in the ecosystem, with particular focus on Ethereum Layer 2s and whether or not this is a good path forward for holders of Eth.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain, Friederike Ernst & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/454
EthCC is over for another year and what a week it was! 6 stages, 2,000 attendees, over 200 speakers, 40 hours of talks and content, 40 sponsors, and 130 side events (and parties) all over Paris. The Ethereum France team pulled it off again with the fifth edition of the Ethereum Community Conference bringing the community together in the city of love.
Keeping with tradition we did an EthCC recap panel and were joined by Ethereum France President Jerome de Tychey, EthCC Project Manager Bettina Boon Falleur, and Founder of Giveth Griff Green. We talk about the standout moments of this year's event, how the conference has grown over the years, NFT tickets, the European Ethereum community, and the future of EthCC.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/453
Enzyme Finance, previously named Melon, is a decentralized protocol built on Ethereum (ETH) that allows users to create, manage and invest in custom crypto asset management vehicles onchain. Using Enzyme Smart Vaults, individuals and communities can build, scale and monetize investment strategies that employ the newest innovations in decentralized finance. Enzyme enables Depositors to interact with Vaults in a way that is non-custodial and requires minimal trust between parties. Vault Managers can be bound to performing certain actions or forbidden from others.
We were joined by Mona El Isa, CEO & founder at Avantgarde Finance and Enzyme Finance, for the second time after her first appearance 5 years ago. We chat about the transition from Melon to Enzyme and the current state of the protocol, how vaults work on the platform, decentralized governance and how to survive a bear market.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/452
The hotly anticipated Ethereum merge due later this year, will see the joining of the existing execution layer of Ethereum (the Mainnet we use today) with its new proof-of-stake consensus layer, the Beacon Chain. It eliminates the need for energy-intensive mining and instead secures the network using staked ETH. This is a truly exciting step in the Ethereum vision of more scalability, security, and sustainability.
Tim Beiko, Protocol Support for the Ethereum Foundation, is heavily involved in the project. He joined us to give some deep insights into governance within Ethereum, a full update on how the merge is coming along and the next steps, and how Ethereum will look post-merge.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Joseph Schweitzer. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/451
Urbit is an exciting new operating system and peer-to-peer network that’s simple by design, built to last forever, and 100% owned by its users. Under the hood it's a from-scratch software stack compact enough that individual developers can understand and control it completely. Urbit deconstructs the client-server model in favor of a federated network of personal servers with built-in, cryptographically-owned identity, each of which is capable of distributing and running their own applications that communicate over the Urbit network.
We were joined by the Executive Director of the Urbit Foundation, Josh Lehman, who explained in depth how the Urbit ecosystem was built and now runs, the advantages of the network from user and developer perspectives, the bridge with crypto, and how the roadmap for the kernel is looking going forward.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/450
Wyre is a leading fiat-to-cryptocurrency and payment infrastructure company for the cryptocurrency ecosystem. In blockchain time, Wyre has been around forever -- it was founded in 2013. Wyre leverages blockchain to facilitate cross-border payments, bridging the gap between traditional payment processing and digital assets. Focusing on developers, the company provides easy-to-integrate APIs which enable thousands of developers to bring cryptocurrency to the masses. The company has “on-ramped” over 15 million end users to their partners and has processed over $10B in payments since inception.
We were joined by Co-founder and CEO Yanni Giannaros, and Director of Crypto Strategy Jamal Raees, to chat about payments applications in general and in web3, how Wyre works on a technical and business level including regulatory constraints, their recent acquisition by Bolt, and the roadmap for the platform.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/449
Arbitrum is a Layer 2 scaling solution for the Ethereum blockchain which helps reduce high transaction gas fees. Arbitrum uses a multi-round optimistic rollup that regularly checks in with Ethereum’s main chain.
OG cypherpunk and ex deputy CTO of the USA, Ed Felten, is one of the creators of Arbitrum. He joined us for an in depth chat about how transactions are processed on the protocol, who validates them, what the security guarantees are, and how the economics will work in the longer term.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/448
Connext is a crosschain liquidity network that speeds up fully-noncustodial transfers between EVM-compatible crosschains (xapps) and L2 systems. Connext works in tandem with nomad bridge technology, enabling fast transfer of value between blockchains and interchain DeFi protocols. Their goal is to create a world where users never need to know what chain or rollup they're on, and developers can build applications that utilize resources from many chains/rollups simultaneously.
We were joined by Connext founder Arjun Bhuptani to chat about bridge technology in general, Connext's pivot from state channels to bridges, their recent partnership with Nomad, and what is coming next.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/447
MetaMask is the de-facto standard self-custodial wallet for Ethereum. It started off as a web browser extension on chromium. More recently, it also launched a mobile app. MetaMask allows you to interact with decentralized applications (dapps) natively.
We were joined by Dan Finlay, Founder & Group Manager at MetaMask, to chat about the motivation for building MetaMask, the security of the platform, decentralization, the future of seed phrases and much more!
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/446"
The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) allows users to register .eth domain names, which can be used natively in some browsers and all Ethereum wallets. It provides a solution to long crypto addresses with a human-friendly format, analogous to DNS domain names that point to IP addresses. There are now 1.1 million registered domains on ENS.
Nick Johnson, Lead Developer of ENS, was last on the show 5 years ago when ENS had just been created. We had him back on to give us an update on how the project had evolved and to chat about the kinds of content ENS domains point to, the ENS token airdrop, the governance of the platform, and the road ahead, particularly with respect to scaling solutions and spiralling Ethereum gas costs.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/445
Aave is an open-source moneymarket protocol. An Ethereum native, it's deployed on Avalanche and Polygon, with more than $1 billion deposited on each. V3 is now live on seven different blockchains, including Fantom, Arbitrum, Optimism and Harmony. Aave, which has a decentralized governance system, collects about $50 million in revenue per year to its treasury through its various activities, which makes it self-sustainable.
Two years after his last visit to the show and after the recent Aave 3.0 release, we had Stani Kulechov, founder of Aave, back on to chat about governance within the DeFi space, his new project Lens Protocol, and the road ahead for not only his projects, but also the ecosystem as a whole.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/444
Chun Wang started mining Bitcoin in 2011 and later created F2Pool, one of the leading Proof-of-Work mining pools. Despite his deep involvement in Proof-of-Work, Chun also recognized the transformative impact of Proof-of-Stake and started stakefish. stakefish has become one of the leading staking provider.
Chun joined us to talk about his journey and reflections on Bitcoin, Ethereum and Proof-of-Stake. We also dove into the topic of humans becoming a multi-planetary species and whether Bitcoin's consensus could be modified to allow mining on different planets.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/443
Florian Glatz, blockchain.lawyer, is one of the most knowledgeable OG's at the intersection of crypto and law. He was last on the show 6 years ago when we talked in great detail about smart contracts and the DAO. We welcomed him back to discuss the regulatory environment, with a focus on Europe. We covered key topics like the recently floated Proof of Work ban, Travel of Funds Regulation (TFR), and Markets in Crypto-assets (MiCA) regulation. We also discussed the European Crypto Initiative, a new lobby organization that Florian co-founded, which is advocating for crypto-friendly regulation on a European level.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/422
Multicoin Capital is a thesis-driven investment firm that invests in the crypto space. They manage a hedge fund and a venture fund, investing across both public and private markets. Since their founding in 2017, they have become known for their high returns.
We were joined by founders Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain, for Multicoin's third visit on the show, to chat about how they came together to form Multicoin, their current investment thesis and how it has evolved, and the road ahead in the blockchain ecosystem.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/441
Regen Network is a blockchain focused on ecological regeneration and reversing climate change. Their aim is to reinvent the economics of agriculture so that farmers are seen not only as food producers, but also as land stewards. Regen Network serve as the foundation on which which other projects and protocols may build upon and harness to execute their own climate-focused business models. Using a distributed ledger and modern remote sensing technology, the Regen team are creating new tools allowing humanity to reconnect with the environment.
We were joined by CEO & Co-founder of Regen, Gregory Landua, to chat about what has motivated him to create Regen. We took a deep dive into how Regen Network works and especially discussed carbon credits and the Nature Carbon Ton (NCT), a novel carbon credit token they are launching.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/440
Brian was joined by Felix Lutsch, CCO of Chorus One, for a discussion of what is going on in crypto today. The discussion included the evolving Proof-of-Stake landscape, the role of and trends around liquid staking and interoperability. They also discussed the crypto markets and the possible impact of a changing macro environment with increasing inflation.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/439
Anoma is a set of protocols that puts privacy front and center. It aims to facilitate “Self-Sovereign Communities” by providing tools that grant increased control to individuals and communities governing their day-to-day interactions and activities.
We were joined by co-founders Adrian Brink and Christopher Goes, to help unravel the complex offering that is the Anoma Network. Hear as we chat about why they created Anoma, some use cases to explain how it works, and the roadmap going forward.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/438
Leveraging the Cosmos SDK, Evmos is the first IBC-compatible EVM-based blockchain, bringing composability, interoperability, and fast finality to Ethereum. While much of the Cosmos ecosystem has embraced CosmWasm to deploy smart contracts, Evmos brings EVM capabilities to the Interchain and allows developers to write contracts in Solidity, the most widely used language in crypto.
While the Evmos launch was halted in early March due to a critical vulnerability and a failed chain upgrade, the project is highly anticipated by the Cosmos community as it promises to bring speed, scale, and interoperability to Ethereum. This week, Sebastien was joined by the co-founder of Evmos, Federico Kunze Küllmer, to chat about the innovation that Evmos is bringing to the EVM ecosystem and the long-term vision for the project.
This episode is an excerpt of an extended interview with Federico released on The Interop, a new podcast hosted by Sebastien Couture. To hear the full interview and subscribe to The Interop, check the episode links.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/437
After more than three years in the making, Laura Shin has just released her first book, The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze. In it she dives into the history of Ethereum and the 2017 ICO craze by telling the tale of the early tensions and power struggle that defined Ethereum's founding. It gives the inside story of The DAO, and depicts 2017's global initial coin offering tidal wave that boosted prices and fortunes.
Laura Shin, former Forbes journalist, podcast host, and now author, joined us for a fascinating chat about the research that went into the book (including the 200+ interviews), revealing the infamous Ethereum hacker, and how the book has been received and her future plans for another.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/436
Worldcoin is a start-up trying to engineer widespread adoption for its cryptocurrency by giving away tokens. Sound too good to be true? Depends how you look at it (literally). Participants must be willing to have their eyes scanned on registration by a proprietary iris scanner dubbed 'orb'. Worldcoin says the scan is necessary to prove that users are human and to verify they only register once. The start-up has attracted big investors but it has also raised concerns among an increasingly privacy-conscious public with some labeling it a MLM.
We were joined by co-founder and CEO, Alex Blania, who explained the idea behind Worldcoin and the aspect of UBI, the current number of orbs in circulation and users, and he addresses the criticisms they have faced so far. Worldcoin is due to launch later this year.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/435
Helium is a global, distributed network of long-range wireless coverage hotspots for Internet of Things (IoT) devices, powered by the Helium blockchain. Community run hotspots create 'The People’s Network' and they are rewarded with $HNT, the native cryptocurrency of the network, through the Proof-of-Coverage mechanism. Helium has managed to build the largest P2P network with over 600,000 hotspots and is now starting to deploy other networks like a 5g cellular network.
We were joined by Founder and CEO of Helium, Amir Haleem, to chat about how Helium works and the most interesting use cases, how the Proof-of-Coverage mechanism allows the community to participate, and the road ahead for the network.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/434
Axelar is a highly scalable, decentralized blockchain that aims to connect all existing blockchains. The proof of stake network, built on the Cosmos-SDK, allows application developers to choose the best blockchain to deploy their applications and use Axelar’s cross-chain communication protocols to lock, unlock, and transfer assets between networks, as well as communicate with applications on other blockchains.
Co-founder and CEO of Axelar, Sergey Gorbunov joined us to chat about his experience working on Algorand, the importance and future of interoperabilty protocols, and the vision behind Axelar.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/433
It's been just short of 2 years since we had Julian Assange's father John, and Harry Halpin, on the show to chat about his imprisonment and the impact it could have on the crypto community. At that time it was unknown if/when Julian would be extradited to the US to face trial. On December 10 2021, the US government won its appeal of a British court ruling that barred Assange’s extradition to the US. On the very same day the AssangeDAO was born and now has a thriving community of 10k people behind it.
The DAO raised over $50 million and the funds were used to bid on an NFT, Clock, which is part of a collection between Assange and digital artist Pak. The bid was successful and proceeds from the sale of the Clock NFT will go to support Assange’s legal defence fund and awareness campaign about the free speech implications of his case.
We were joined by Julian's brother Gabriel, and Stellar Magnet, core contributors of the AssangeDAO. We spoke about Julian's case as it currently stands, how the DAO was born and why they chose to purchase the NFT, and the road ahead.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/432
NEAR Protocol is a leading smart contract platform that aims for simplicity, security and scalability. NEAR was one of the first sharded blockchains and allows deploying smart contracts using Web Assembly on currently four different shards. NEAR's sharding design, Nightshade, splits the blocks into different segments, which allows for great scalability without negatively impacting user and developer experience. Since, its launch NEAR has evolved into one of the most active smart contract ecosystems.
Illia and Alex, co-founders of NEAR, joined us to chat about the NEAR's protocol design and recent advances, such as the launch of Aurora, NEAR's EVM shard. We also discussed how their sharding solution works and how it can scale to support a massive amount of users and applications.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/431
Gitcoin is a platform which funds software developers for work in open source ecosystems. Open source creates value without capturing it: Gitcoin creates funding mechanism to correct the asymmetry between value created and value captured. So far they have raised $51million, which were then distributed to public goods projects.
We were joined, for the second time, by Gitcoin's founder Kevin Owocki. Hear as we chat about quadratic and public good funding, the Internet of Jobs, and Kevin's book, Greenpilled - Regenerative CryptoEcononmics, which is out soon!
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/430
Agoric is an Proof-of-Stake blockchain built on the Cosmos-SDK that allows developers to create secure smart contracts written in JavaScript. It offers developers safe, reusable DeFi components and built-in economic primitives like a stablecoin, while connecting to the larger blockchain ecosystem via IBC.
Besides covering the Agoric platform, we dove into the long prehistory with Agoric CEO Dean Tribble. Dean and his co-founders have been working on smart contracts and secure computing for decades, long before cryptocurrencies were invented, and a lot of that work shaped the Agoric platform today. We talked about underlying design principles like the Object Capability Security Model, but also the tradeoffs between Ethereum's model of scaling on a single chain versus the Cosmos model of sovereign chains interoperating asynchronously.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/429
Olympus is a hotly debated project in the DeFi space. It posits to be a decentralized reserve currency protocol. Each OHM token is partially backed by the Olympus treasury, but how large the treasury is, depends on what is counted towards it. We would argue that OHM tokens should be discounted for this purpose. Users can interact with Olympus DAO through staking and bonding, which incentivizes users to deposit or sell their collateral to the Olympus treasury in return for discounted OHM tokens.
We were joined by Olympus Founder Zeus to chat about why the protocol was created and how it works, and we address the debate about it being a Ponzi scheme.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Zubin Koticha. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/428
Zodiac is a collection of tools built according to an open standard which proposes a composable design philosophy for DAOs. Built by the Gnosis Guild team, this extension pack for DAOs enables connection between platforms, protocols, and chains, no longer confined to monolithic designs. It not only changes access, but bridges chains, organizations, and networks through DAO-to-DAO (D2D) collaboration mechanisms.
We were joined by Kei Kreuther and Auryn Macmillan, founders of Gnosis Guild, a core contributor to the Zodiac platform. Hear as we chat about the rise of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, the Zodiac Toolset and how it works, and the future of DAOs in not only the blockchain space but also in the real economy.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/427
The current lack of privacy on the internet exposes billions of people to mass surveillance and data breaches, undermining trust in digital services and stifling innovation. Nym is a mixnet and develops the infrastructure to prevent this data leakage by protecting every packet’s metadata at the network and application layers.
We were joined by Nym's CEO & Founder Harry Halpin, and CSO Jaya Klara Brekke, to chat about the threat mass surveillance has on society, what Nym sets out to do and take a deep dive into the architecture of the protocol.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/426
Formerly Enigma, Secret Network is a blockchain-based, open-source protocol built using the Cosmos SDK. It uses Trusted Execution Environments on nodes to marry privacy-by-default with smart contracts.
We welcomed Guy Zyskind, Founder & CEO of Secret Network, back on the show to chat about the progression of the project into the new protocol and why this is now built on Cosmos, advantages and drawbacks in using Trusted Execution Environments and SGX technology over cryptography only, and why people might want to keep NFTs private.
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This episode is hosted by Sunny Aggarwal & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/425
The DarkFi squad return for the second part of this 2 part episode. We chat about the FreeAssange DAO, totalitarianism in crypto, and hear about Amir's early involvement in many projects including Bitcoin, DarkMarket (OpenBazaar) and even Ethereum. Diving a bit more technical, we also cover the DarkFi platform, a new blockchain that prioritizes privacy. As a base layer for anonymous applications and smart contracts, it's a multichain interoperable, and open source product that anyone can build any type of applications on utilizing zero-knowledge proof.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/424
DarkFi is a new DeFi platform that prioritizes privacy. As a base layer for anonymous applications and smart contracts, it's a multichain interoperable, and open source product that anyone can build any type of application on utilising zero knowledge proof. The goal is to create a universe that anyone can access irrespective of their nationality or political beliefs.
Amir Taaki, Rachel-Rose O'Leary and Ivan Jelincic, the members of the squad, joined us to chat about the importance of darkness and privacy within crypto utilizing zero knowledge proof technology. This is a 2-part series and in the next episode we explore AMMs, and the Free Assange DAO
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/423
Fei Protocol is a decentralized, liquid, and scalable stablecoin platform, based on a new concept called Protocol Controlled Value (PCV). After a rocky start, Fei is now back on the road to growth with an upcoming v2 and one of the biggest token mergers in crypto history.
On the day before the Fei v2 launch, we were joined by Founder Joey Santoro to chat about the differences between v1 and v2, how the platform works on a PCV model, TRIBE and protocol governance, and the Rari merger.
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This episode is hosted by Sunny Aggarwal & Statelayer. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/422
2021 was an exciting year for the crypto space. We've seen all time market highs, dramatic regulatory shifts, and some use cases hit the main stream. 4 of our hosts got together to dissect the standout events of this year, and share their predictions for what is coming next.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture, Brian Fabian Crain, Friederike Ernst & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/421
Sorare is a blockchain sports game which bridges fantasy football and NFT collectibles. A player collects a team of players in the form of NFTs and based on the performance of the players in the real world, scores points. At the end of the tournament, the Sorare participant is ranked and earns rewards.
Nicolas Julia, Co-founder & CEO of Sorare, created the game in 2018, way before the NFT craze of 2021. He joined us to chat about fantasy sports and what convinced him of NFTs, working in the football industry and the impact of licenses, and the regulatory push backs they have faced as a company.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/420
Avalanche is an open, scalable, and secure smart contracts platform. It targets three broad use cases; building application-specific blockchains, building and launching highly scalable decentralized applications (dapps), and building arbitrarily complex digital assets with custom rules, covenants, and riders (smart assets). It prides itself off on being blazingly fast, low cost, and eco-friendly.
Emin Gün Sirer is the Founder & CEO of the Avalanche network. He is also a long time friend of the show, and joined us again for the 4th time after a 5 year break to share his journey since then, which led him to creating Avalanche. We also dove deep into the technical aspects of the protocol and how it fits into the blockchain ecosystem as a whole.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/419
Solana has pursued the vision of a single, fast and scalable blockchain from the start. Today, it has become one of the fastest growing ecosystems in crypto with hundreds of projects spanning DeFi, NFTs, Web3, and more.
Last week 2,000 attendees descended on Lisbon for the first-ever Solana conference, Breakpoint. We caught up with Co-founder and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko at the event for a chat about the Solana journey and some of the most important questions they are facing today around decentralization, scalability, governance, and MEV.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/418
Coin Center is an independant not-profit research and advocacy organisation focused on the public policy issues that affect cryptocurrencies and open permisionless blockchain networks. Their mission is to build a better understanding of technologies like Ethereum and Bitcoin and to promote a regulatory climate that preserves free speech and privacy.
Jerry Brito and Peter Van Valkenburgh joined us for a fascinating chat about the current regulatory landscape in the US and how that might affect the crypto ecosystem going forward.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/417
Cometh is a game on Ethereum that lets users own yield-generating NFTs, integrating both DeFi and NFT features into a single, fun gaming experience. As a player, you control spaceships (also called astronomers) orbiting around giant stars and your goal is to position yourself close to the asteroids (also known as smart asteroids) passing by. When you are close enough, you will be able to mine tokens from that asteroid.
Jerome de Tychey, founder of the project, joined us to chat about how the game works, interactions with AMMs and lending protocols, and the future of blockchain gaming.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/416
Gyroscope is an "all-weather stablecoin" that is backed by a reserve portfolio that tries to diversify across many risk factors. By maintaining a reserve of many decorrelated assets, it makes Gyro Dollars more resilient, similar to how it is hard to move a spinning gyroscope. In a market where there's an explosion of new stablecoins, Gyroscope attempts to find a niche by providing a very stable and resilient option.
We were joined by co-founders Lewis Gudgeon and Ariah Klages-Mundt to chat about how Gyroscope works and their strategy to try to make it a standard throughout DeFi.
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This episode is hosted by Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/415
PieDAO is is a decentralized asset manager for tokenized portfolios and enables anyone to create allocations for both crypto and traditional assets. PIES are non-custodial pools available to anyone in the world with an internet connection. PIES require no minimum deposits for users. DOUGH is the token that governs the platform. Token holders are given voting rights on all decisions.
We were joined by the Founder of PieDAO, Alessio Delmonti, to talk about how the project works and why he is so committed to making wealth creation more accessible to all.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/414
Notional is a protocol on Ethereum that facilitates fixed-rate, fixed-term crypto asset lending and borrowing. The core concept of Notional is fCash, a zero-compound bond defined by a currency type and maturity date. Notional’s liquidity pools are built by liquidity providers who contribute cTokens and fCash and act as counterparty to the lenders and borrowers that are active on the protocol.
We were joined by co-founders Teddy Woodward and Jeff Wu to chat about the benefits and tradeoffs of fixed rate interest borrowing, how Notional operates, and comparisons to other lending protocols in the space.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/413
Lido is a DAO that provides a liquid staking solution for Ethreum 2.0. It lets users stake their Ether, without locking assets or needing to maintain infrastructure, whilst participating in on-chain activities. Lido attempts to solve the problems associated with initial Ethereum 2.0 staking - illiquidity, minimum requirements, immovability and accessibility, by making staked Ether liquid and allowing for participation in DeFi.
Vasiliy Shapovalov, Co-founder of Lido, joined us to talk about all things Ethereum staking and the benefits of liquid staking with Lido.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/412
The Reserve project is on a mission to provide every person in the world access to stable currency. They are working to rebuild financial services in countries such as Argentina and Venezuela, that have suffered from high inflation and ongoing currency devaluation. The protocol is designed to host a completely decentralized stablecoin that can not be manipulated by governments, with an end goal of a fully self-sustainable platform with decentralized governance and developments.
We were joined by Co-founder & CEO, Nevin Freeman, to chat about Reserve's focus in Latin America, their support of activism, and the road ahead for the project.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/411
Hermez is an open-source ZK-Rollup optimised for secure, low-cost and usable token transfers on the wings of Ethereum. The Hermez network team is currently developing the next version of the decentralised ZK-Rollup with full support of Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) by making a full set of zkEVM opcodes.
Jordi Baylina, the Technical Lead at Hermez, joined us to chat about how the protocol works, the recent merge with Polygon, and the roadmap leading to Eth2.0.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/410
Erik Voorhees, CEO & Founder of ShapeShift, joins us for his 4th appearance on the show. ShapeShift recently announced they are decentralizing the company and its products, which would see the company transition from a centralized entity and platform to a DAO. With the largest airdrop in history they distributed FOX tokens to over a million customers and DeFi community members, who will eventually fully control the exchange.
In this episode we hear the reasoning behind this shift, cross-chain Interoperability, the FOX token, and the future of the Shapeshift platform as a DAO.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/409
ParaSwap is a DEX aggregator that aims to provide the best prices over multiple DEXes on the Ethereum blockchain. Users are able to scan dozens of exchanges for the best possible crypto price points, and get the most for their swaps.
We were joined by ParaSwap Founder, Mounir Benchemled, to chat about his role in the French DeFi community, DEX aggregators in general, and what makes ParaSwap an important slice of the DeFi ecosystem.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/408
Mike Novogratz is the CEO of Galaxy Digital, an investment bank targeting institutional investors, which he also founded. He was formerly a Partner and President of Fortress Investment Group LLC and prior to that Partner at Goldman Sachs. Considered quite the risk taker, he has made and lost many fortunes over the years.
We chatted to Mike about the cross over between finance and blockchain, regulatory affairs, and of course, wrestling.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/407
The DFINITY Foundation is a not-for-profit scientific research organization with a mission to build, promote, and maintain the Internet Computer. The IC is a layer 1 smart contract enabled blockchain which achieves remarkable scaling properties through native sharding.
We were joined by Founder and Chief Scientist of DFINITY, Dominic Williams, who explained his deep support for smart contracts, gave us an insight into the Internet Computer Ecosystem, and shared his visions for its future.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Martin Köppelmann. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/406
Aztec Protocol enables private transactions on Ethereum. It uses a zero-knowledge proof system, allowing users to effectively create shielded representations of tokens, which can then be sent and redeemed for the underlying token. They recently launched Aztec 2.0 and their rollup service for Ethereum, zk.money. This allows users to submit Ether to the Aztec rollup contract with the options to shield, send privately, unshield and emergency ushield (escape hatch). The latest version also allows DeFi users to save gas and participate anonymously in DeFi transactions.
We were joined by Zac Williamson, Co-founder and CTO, and Joe Andrews, Head of Product, from Aztec, to give us an in-depth look into the Layer 2 project and explain how version 2 of the protocol in a game-changer in terms of privacy and scalability.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Dev Ojha. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/405
Badger is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) with a single purpose: To build the products and infrastructure necessary to accelerate Bitcoin as collateral across other blockchains. BadgerDAO is extremely community focused and has succeeded in creating a seamlessly operating DAO out of a group of random people with a shared set of values and a mission.
BadgerDAO's founder, Chris Spadafora, joined us to talk about how he built this decentralized community, why Bitcoin & DeFi, and the products they have created including Sett and Digg.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/404
VitaDAO is a decentralized collective funding early stage longevity research. Their mission is to extend human lifespan by researching, financing, and commercializing longevity therapeutics in an open and democratic manner.
We were joined by Tyler Golato and Paul Kohlhaas, co-founders of Molecule and initiators of VitaDAO to talk about how drug discovery and approval currently works, what the status of longevity research is, what role IP plays -- and how all of this could change in the future with DAOs like VitaDAO.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/403
Vitalik Buterin joins us for an in-depth conversation at EthCC 4 in Paris. During his keynote presentation, he expressed his hope for Ethereum to go beyond DeFi as he wishes to see more non-financial applications built on the platform. From better social media platforms to novel approaches for funding public goods, from his perspective, Ethereum has the potential to change the world for the better, beyond financial applications.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/402
EthCC is back and stronger than ever! Despite the pandemic, ongoing travel restrictions and sanitary passes, the Ethereum France team hosted the fourth edition of the Ethereum Community Conference in Paris. Over 1,000 people attended the week-long affair, which saw an impressive number of side events and, as always, legendary parties. For many attendees, it was their first conference since last year's edition, and the first time they were able to embrace their fellow Etherians since the beginning of the pandemic.
For this EthCC recap panel, we're joined by Kaiko CEO Ambre Soubiran, Ethereum France President Jerome de Tychey, and ParaSwap Founder Mounir Benchemled. We discussed the conference, how the ecosystem has evolved this past year, the rapid growth of DeFi and NFTs, and what to look forward to as the community continues to grow.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/401
Recently launched Osmosis is a Cosmos based and IBC enabled AMM protocol that allows for a high level of customization by liquidity providers. As the main dex on the Cosmos network, Osmosis provides liquidity for IBC-enabled Cosmos assets like AKT and ATOM for the first time.
Head of the Osmosis development team, Sunny Aggarwal, joined us for a chat about why the protocol was built and the problem it solves, the wider Cosmos ecosystem, and the roadmap for the protocol.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Zubin Koticha. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/400
Originally started with a focus on prediction markets, Gnosis has done innovative work around automated market makers (AMMs) and decentralized exchanges for years. The latest protocol launched by the Gnosis team is CowSwap. CowSwap introduces various innovations that could improve user experience, reduce gas costs, reduce the effects of MEV and result in better outcomes for retail traders.
We were joined by Felix Leupold, software developer at Gnosis to discuss CowSwap and the future of decentralized exchanges.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/399
Centrifuge is an open and permissionless protocol built on Polkadot and Ethereum that unlocks collateral for DeFi. Centrifuge allows for the tokenization of real world assets such as invoices, real estate, or goods, and puts them on the blockchain. This allows users to borrow against these assets from investors. Investors lend dai in exchange for an interest rate that depends on the borrower and the asset used as collateral.
We were joined by Lucas Vogelsang, CEO & Centrifuge Co-founder, and Cassidy Daly, Token Design & Research at Centrifuge. They explained why they built the protocol and how it works, the first application built on top, Tinlake, its integration with other DeFi platforms such as Maker, and their vision for the future.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/398
Ethereum 2.0 is an upgrade to the Ethereum network that aims to improve the network's security and scalability. Recently, we chatted to Danny Ryan about the Merge and switch to Proof of Stake. As a follow up to that episode, we were joined by Dankrad Feist, who heads the sharding and statelessness research at the Ethereum Foundation.
We dove deep into the technical infrastructure of how Eth2 addresses scaling through sharding, the pros and cons of data shards vs. execution shards, and how this links up with ZK-rollups. We also talked about the Ethereum state and how the state can be altered for protocol improvements.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/397
zkSync is a trustless protocol for scalable low-cost transactions on Ethereum. It's also the only zkRollup protocol which supports EVM smart contracts.
Alex Gluchowski is co-founder of Matter Labs, and co-creator of zkSync. We spoke with Alex in depth about how the protocol works and the potential for a highly scalable transaction and application layer on Ethereum.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/396
By default, all transactions made on Ethereum are public. Tornado Cash is a decentralized privacy preserving solution built on Ethereum which adds privacy through obfuscation. Users can place Ether and some stable coins in prescribed increments [1 Eth, 10 Eth, 100 Eth...] into the Tornado Pool. In return, they are issued a private note, with which they can withdraw funds at a later time to a different address.
We were joined by Roman Semenov, co-founder of Tornado Cash, to talk about how the protocol works, how it was set up, community governance, and where he sees Tornado Cash's position in the quickly growing privacy ecosystem on Ethereum.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/395
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are tokens that we can use to represent ownership of unique items. They let us tokenize things like art, collectibles, even real estate. They can only have one official owner at a time and they're secured by the Ethereum blockchain. And they have taken the crypto space by storm is recent months. Showtime is a NFT social media network where creators & collectors showcase their digital art. It reads all marketplaces and instead of buying and selling, you can comment, share and like. It's been described as the Instagram for NFTs.
We were joined by Alex Masmej, Co-founder and CEO of Showtime, to chat about why he got into NFTs and in particular crypto art, how Showtime works and its purpose, and the future of the platform.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/394
Ethereum will switch from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS) likely already later this year in a much anticipated upgrade to Ethereum 2. The switch to PoS aims to make Ethereum both more secure and more sustainable by securing the network through Ether instead of mining. A second Eth2 update will address scaling through sharding at a later time.
Danny Ryan, Researcher with Ethereum Foundation, has been a major driving force behind the Eth2 project. He joined us for a progress update and we chatted about how the protocol will work in its steady state, what has launched so far, what happens in The Merge, and how PoS will affect centralization tendencies.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Martin Köppelmann. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/393
Alchemix is a DeFi protocol that enables users to create self-repaying loans. Users deposit collateral (DAI) to take out a loan in Alchemix's native synthetic stablecoin, alUSD. Alchemix then uses the DAI deposits and puts them into the Yearn protocol to earn yield and over time, that yield automatically pays off your debt.
We were joined by Alchemix co-founder Scoopy Trooples, who gave us a deep look into how the protocol works, alUSD and the ALCX token, and what is coming out soon with V2.
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This episode is hosted by Sunny Aggarwal & Zubin Koticha. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/392
Curve is an Automated Market Maker (AMM) that lets users and other decentralized protocols exchange stablecoins (DAI to USDC for example) with low fees and low slippage. Unlike exchanges that match a buyer and a seller, users transact with the smart contract itself. By providing a flatter curve targeted for relatively stable pairs, Curve has established the lead position for these markets. Curve is also leveraging its own token CRV to incentivize long-term adoption of the protocol and decentralize control of governance.
We were joined by Curve Finance Founder, Michael Egorov, to chat about why he created the protocol and his long term vision for the project.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Zubin Koticha. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/391
Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP)-1559 is a proposal to make several tightly coupled additions to Ethereum’s transaction fee mechanism. Central to the design is a base fee, which plays the role of a reserve price and is meant to match supply and demand. Every transaction included in a block must pay that block’s base fee (per unit of gas), and this payment is burnt rather than transferred to the block’s miner. The base fee is adjusted after every block, with larger-than-target blocks increasing it and smaller-than-target blocks decreasing it.
Tim Roughgarden is a Professor of Computer Science and member of the Data Science Institute at Columbia University. Tim did an extensive game theoretical review of EIP-1559 and joined us to chat about what the proposal is trying to do and why, and how it is doing it.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/390
Flashbots is a research and development company focussed on Miner Extractable Value (MEV). MEV is the profit a miner can make through their ability to arbitrarily include, exclude, or re-order transactions from the blocks they produce. Flashbots has created a fork of the ethereum geth client, MEV-geth, to allow miners to exploit MEV, currently run by 80% of miners.
Co-founders of Flashbots, Stephane Gosselin and Phil Daian, recently joined us to chat about the protocol and to deep dive into the good, the bad, and the ugly of MEV.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/389
Trevor McFedries joined us for a fascinating chat about his background in the football and music industries, and how this led him into crypto. Trevor is the cofounder of Brud, a technology startup specializing in artificial intelligence and media. At Brud, they create social media personas with the help of CGI technology, the most well known being Lil Miquela. Lil Miquela is a sentient robot navigating life in LA -- and has millions of followers on instagram.
Trevor also started Friends With Benefits, a gated online community on a private discord server with a community token. We talked with Trevor about the increasingly immersive social media experience, the future for creators and the future of organizations.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/388
Bitcoin just got smarter. This episode is brought to you by RSK, the Bitcoin-based smart contract platform leading the DeFi for Bitcoin revolution. Be part of the future while building your personal wealth with the Bitcoin you already have.
RSK is a secure smart-contract platform that enables decentralized applications secured by the Bitcoin Network to empower people and improve the quality of life of millions. The platform incorporates a Turing Complete Virtual Machine to Bitcoin. RSK believes that new use cases are necessary in order for Bitcoin to become the leading global cryptocurrency, and that adding smart-contract capabilities is key to secure that future. It also provides other enhancements to the network such as faster transactions and better scalability, features that they also believe will enable new usage scenarios.
We chatted to Adrian Eidelman, Co-founder of RSK, about the vision they have for the project, how it works on a technical level, and how you can become involved.
Visit rsk.co/openfinance to find out how you can put your Bitcoin to work.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/B005
The ability to move Bitcoin on other chains isn't a new idea, and many are trying to overcome the technical limitations which make this a technically challenging feat. The latest representation of Bitcoin on Ethereum is tBTC, a fully-backed ERC-20 token representing bitcoin collateral. tBTC is fully decentralized and relies on Keep Network, a decentralized multi-party computation which enables cross-chain bridging.
We were joined by Matt Luongo, CEO of Thesis (the team behind tBTC and Keep Network) to chat about the tBTC technology, his vision for the future of interoperability and value propositions of different chains.
Topics covered in this episode:
- Matt's background - how he got into crypto and his experience in the space
- The Keep Network - dencetralized multi-party computations
- Why trustless minting of tBTC is important
- tBTC and its security model
- Dark DAOs and vote buying
- The merge between Keep Network and NuCypher
- What other mergers are being looked at for the future
- Matt's views on the idea of BTC existing as tokenized asset on Ethereum and other chains
Episode links:
- [Thesis](https://thesis.co/)
- [Keep](https://keep.network/)
- [tBTC](https://tbtc.network/)
- [Keep Discord](https://discord.com/invite/wYezN7v)
- [Thesis on Twitter](https://twitter.com/thesis_co)
- [Keep on Twitter](https://twitter.com/keep_project)
Sponsors:
- ParaSwap: Give ParaSwap a try at paraswap.io/epicenter. This URL will allow you to claim a 50% refund on gas fees for your first swap of at least 1 Eth. This offer is available until May 1st 2021 and refunds will be made every Friday starting April 9th, 2021 - Terms and conditions apply.
- Solana: Solana is the high performance blockchain supporting over 50k transactions per second to power the next generation of decentralized applications. - https://solana.com/epicenter
- Exodus: Exodus the easy-to-use crypto wallet available on all platforms and supporting over 100 different assets. - https://exodus.com/epicenter
This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: [epicenter.tv/387](https://epicenter.tv/387)
1inch Exchange is a DEX aggregator routing cryptocurrency purchases through different DEXs to reduce slippage and get a better conversion rate for the user compared with just using a single DEX. The platform launched its governance token, 1INCH, in December 2020.
We were joined by Co-founder of 1inch Sergej Kunz to chat about how 1inch works, how the 1INCH token provides liquidity to their liquidity platform, its integration with platforms such as Uniswap, and the roadmap from here.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/386
Zubin Koticha, CEO & Co-founder of Opyn, joined us again on the show to give us an update on Opyn v2.
Opyn v1 was focused on insurance. It's successor, Opyn v2, offers a more traditional options infrastructure. We discuss the problems of building trustless options infrastructure: choice of collateral, partial collateralization and efficient trading mechanisms for options.
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This episode is hosted by Sunny Aggarwal & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/385
Liquity is a decentralized borrowing protocol that allows you to draw interest-free loans against Ether used as collateral. In addition to the collateral, the loans are secured by a Stability Pool containing LUSD and by fellow borrowers collectively acting as guarantors of last resort. Liquity as a protocol is non-custodial, immutable, and governance-free.
We were joined by Robert Lauko, CEO & Co-founder, and Kolten Bergeron, Head of Growth, of Liquity. We chatted about how the protocol is built and the mechanisms used, how to borrow, and the stability pool and liquidations.
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This episode is hosted by Sunny Aggarwal & Zubin Koticha. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/384
KeeperDao is an on-chain liquidity underwriter for DeFi that combines yield farming and profits single-block arbitrage. The mining pool for Keepers incentivizes a game theory optimal strategy for cooperation among arbitrageurs. Their goal is to capture profit opportunities and distribute them to the various participants involved.
We were joined by Joey Zacherl, Co-founder of KeeperDAO, to chat about what the protocol does and its mission, the grim triggering strategy, the ongoing hiding game, and the roadmap for the future.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/383
NFTs are a new paradigm that opens possibilities for new types of interactions. In digital art, it has caught on like wildfire and is transforming how people think of ownership.
Alex Salnikov has been immersed in the crypto world for many years and recognized the potential of NFTs. He created Rarible, an NFT marketplace that has seen rapid growth. But the vision of Rarible is to be more an open transaction protocol for NFTs and serve many different markets.
He joined us to discuss the different NFT use cases and how NFTs can scale and function in a multi-chain world. It's a great conversation at the unfolding of a new paradigm.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/382
Julien Bouteloup is a serial entrepreneur, Ethereum developer and addict of crazy innovative ideas. He started his entrepreneurial career building websites and selling hardware technologies at age 14. Today he is involved with many projects including Stake Capital, Rekt, Curve Finance, and he advises several crypto companies.
Julien strives to bring to light the dark side of crypto. As DeFi grows, so do the number of questionable projects and ethical concerns around certain practices. Julien joins us to talk about the excesses in the DeFi space and how the ecosystem should cope with them.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/381
Namebase is a top-level domain (TLD) name registrar that operates on the Handshake blockchain. It creates an ecosystem of TLDs that may be bought and sold using an on-chain auction mechanism. It takes a different approach to other decentralized domain name systems as Namebase is compatible with the ICANN namespace, the organization governs domain names globally. Users may register TLDs that don't yet exist in the ICANN namespace, like .epicenter or .ethereum, for example, creating the opportunity for new niche domain registrars to emerge.
Tieshun Roquerre, CEO of Namebase, joins us to discuss his vision for Namebase and his ambitious goal to decentralize ICANN.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/380
Stacks is an open-source network of decentralized apps and smart contracts. It is a Layer-1 blockchain that connects to Bitcoin. Stacks uses a Proof of Transfer mining mechanism with bidding and staking capabilities. Clarity is the programming language used, a Turing-incomplete language which aims to give developers a safe way to build complex smart contracts where the code itself clearly shows what the program will do when run.
Muneeb Ali is the CEO and Co-founder of Hiro Systems, one of the companies creating Stacks. He joined us to chat about why he felt there was a need for Stacks, why he chose to build on top of Bitcoin, and the types of apps that are currently being run on Stacks 2.0.
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This episode is hosted by Sunny Aggarwal & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/379
Radicle is a decentralized platform for code collaboration. It's built on Git and is an open-source decentralized alternative to platforms like GitHub. Tools like Radicle are an essential component of the decentralized technology stack and will enable DAOs to commit code through governance.
Co-founders Alexis Sellier & Eleftherios Diakomichalis joined us to chat about why they felt it was important to create Radicle and how it fits into the DAO ecosystem with a more accessible governance system of code.
Topics covered in this episode:
- What Radicle is and the vision they are pursuing
- After both working on Soundcloud, the lessons that were carried over to this project
- The Cathedral vs Bazaar model
- Git usage with the tool
- The technical architecture of Radicle
- The other differences between Radicle and GitHub
- Storage and replicating solutions between peers
- How Radicle promotes open source sustainability
- Ethereum integration with the tool
Episode links:
- [Radicle website](https://radicle.xyz/)
- [Radicle docs](https://docs.radicle.xyz/docs/what-is-radicle.html)
- [Radicle on Twitter](https://twitter.com/radicle)
- [Alexis on Twitter](https://twitter.com/cloudhead)
- [Eleftherios on Twitter](https://twitter.com/lftherios)
Sponsors:
- 1inch: Discover the best rates and most efficient swapping routes across leading DEXes. Optimize on gas cost and execute DeFi trades faster with 1inch V2 - https://epicenter.rocks/1inch
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: [epicenter.tv/378](https://epicenter.tv/378)
Ethereum Push Notification Service (EPNS) emerged from the Indian startup scene in 2020. It's a decentralized notification protocol that enables DApps to send push notifications to Ethereum wallet users. EPNS also provides incentives to users that opt-in for push notifications, creating the possibility for an ecosystem communities around topic-centric channels.
We are joined by Harsh Rajat, Project Lead and Co-founder of EPNS. We chatted about why and how the protocol was built, its technical structure, the purpose of incentivizing users to receive notifications, and how they tackle spam.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/377
Aaron Wright is a professor at Cardozo Law School and Co-founder of OpenLaw. Before this he was a successful entrepreneur, having sold his first company to Wikia - the for-profit version of Wikipedia. Today Aaron is a renowned thought-leader in the blockchain space at the forefront of DAOs. Last year OpenLaw launched The LAO, a DAO on Ethereum for investors looking to earn returns on Ethereum-based projects.
Aaron joins us to share his expert legal knowledge on all things DAO, and discuss his latest projects the LAO and Flamingo DAO.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/376
During the DeFi Summer of 2020, YAM Finance launched with a bang, and had its share of ups and downs within its first couple of days. It started out as an experiment to bring together some of the more innovative ideas in the space. It sparked a movement which brought massive attention to yield farming, and started the food token craze. After a bug was discovered in the v1 contract, many thought the project was dead. But no, the team and community have been working diligently to bring the protocol back to life and it's now a community-run DAO innovating at the intersection of decentralized governance and programmable finance.
Trent Elmore is one of the creators of YAM. He joins us to talk about the incredibly swift birth of the project, the rebase mechanism, the treasury, the infamous bug and how they saved the project. He also shares some of the new upcoming products on the YAM Roadmap, and how a truly decentralized community is rebuilding its brand.
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This episode is hosted by Sunny Aggarwal & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/375
The new year has brought with it a new bull run. This is great news for crypto holders, but at what cost? Will this bring with it a number of negative implications such as regulatory push back and privacy battles? Listen as the five hosts of Epicenter come together for an in-depth chat to share their predictions for the crypto space in 2021.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture, Brian Fabian Crain, Meher Roy, Sunny Aggarwal & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/374
Eric Wall is the Chief Investment Officer at Arcane Assets, but you may already know him from his writing and his presence on Twitter where he offers valuable insights on crypto markets. He joined us on the show to share with us his deep and timely insights into the current bull run and how this compared to 2017, where it is headed from here, and also he opens up on his normally guarded thoughts on the future of Bitcoin and Ethereum.
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Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/373
In this digital age, counting ballots by hand, as recently seen in the US Presidential Election, is very analogue and behind the times. Although the US constitution is over two centuries old and hasn't had a major version update since 1992, European democracies are much more recent and utilizing the technology available today.
This panel discussion looks at how open technologies and new systems of governance could be a path toward a future of democracy. We also hear about the avenues for improvement with modern voting techniques and liquid democracy.
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Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/372
In today's world, life and business is moving more into to a virtual space and this has of course been accelerated as a result of the Covid pandemic. Now more than ever it is important to rethink the very basis of how we organise, make decisions, and structure the world’s governance. And how can we do this in the context of crypto and Web3?
Web3 infrastructure can provide the foundations of a digital jurisdiction. In the Web3 world rules are enforced by decentralized governance and DAOs allow for a group of stakeholders to participate in governance of an organisation that has no affiliation to a nation state. How do we treat that in the judicial system and how does it sit within existing national jurisdictions?
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Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/371
Torus is an open-source and universal key management system for the Web3 ecosystem. It's simple, secure and non-custodial, and suitable for anyone to manage their keys. Torus runs a Distributed Key Generation protocol built on Shamir's Secret Sharing.
Supporting over a hundred thousand authentications a month on popular applications like AAVE, KyberSwap, Augur, GoodDollar, and MyCryptoHeroes, Torus empowers decentralised applications with seamless user onboarding flows while maintaining recoverability and high standards of security for key management.
The Torus Wallet is the second layer to the system and allows one-click login and authentication on partners including Gmail, Facebook, or passwordless logins on Web3 applications. It is however reinforced behind the scenes by a clever distributed architecture. Notably, clever cryptography makes it possible for users to send crypto to social accounts that don't yet have crypto wallet. For example, one could send crypto to a Twitter username, which could be claimed once the recipient creates an account.
The team also recently released a custom version of two-factor authentication (2FA), tKey.
We were joined by Founders of Torus, Yong Zhen Yu and Leonard Tan, who gave us fascinating insight into why and how Torus was built, the recent products released, and what their aims are for the future.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/B003
Crypto is largely reliant on incentive mechanisms, and liquidity mining is one of the more recent cryptoeconomic incentive models to emerge. When decentralized exchanges need liquidity, they can leverage liquidity mining to incentivize users to provide it. In turn, the “miners” generate revenue, generally in the form of a native tokens, proportional to their share of liquidity in a pool. This summer saw a surge in activity surrounding this concept, with Synthetix a notable player.
Kain Warwick is the founder of Synthetix, a company creating synthetic assets for DeFi, enabling exposure to fiat currencies, commodities, and cryptocurrencies. Hasu is a crypto researcher and writer with a focus on game theory and economics. They joined us to explain the key concepts behind liquidity mining, how and why it was created, and its increasingly important role in DeFi.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/370
Matic Network is a Layer-2 scaling solution that provides instant, low cost, and secure transactions on Ethereum. Built on an adapted implementation of Plasma and a decentralized network of Proof-of-Stake (PoS) validators, its goal is to solve the scalability and usability issues for developers building Dapps, whilst not compromising on decentralization and user experience.
Sandeep Nailwal, COO & Co-founder of Matic, joins us to chat about how Matic works and the problems it's solving, and we also get a fascinating look into the crypto and startup community in India.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/369
Filecoin is a peer-to-peer network data storage network, with built-in economic incentives for storage providers. It facilitates open-markets for storing and retrieving data, in which anyone can participate. Users can pay the network to access storage space, which can be encrypted, replicated, and highly available. After years of development and iteration, Filecoin recently launched its mainnet. The long term vision of the protocol is a fully decentralized future for the web.
Juan Benet, Founder & CEO of Protocol Labs, returns for the second part of this 2-part episode. In this show we deep dive in to the technical aspects of Filecoin, how Juan and his team decided to design it, and the types of projects that are building on top of it.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/368
IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) is a fully decentralized distributed system for storing and accessing files, websites, applications, and data. Released just over 5 years ago by Protocol Labs, it has had a tremendous impact in the Web3 space as the standard for how blockchain projects store data. Filecoin is a complementary protocol to IPFS and was recently launched on the mainnet. Filecoin is the economic layer which powers IPFS's decentralized file storage network. It enables users to store their files at hypercompetitive prices and verify that their files are being stored and replicated correctly. And it allows storage providers to sell their storage on an open market.
Juan Benet is the Founder & CEO of Protocol Labs, which has had a huge impact in the blockchain ecosystem, as organisation behind IPFS and Filecoin. Juan returns to the show after 5 years to give us an important update on the long-term vision to fund innovative technologies, IPFS since it was created, and Filecoin as a foundation to a new decentralized cloud.This is a 2-part series and in the next episode we deep dive in to the technical aspects of Filecoin.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/367
Data is a huge industry, worth about $500 billion in Europe alone. And currently there's a fundamental misalignment between those creating data and those consuming it. There's a one direction value flow in terms of those who are providing the value (the data) and those extracting it. These are big tech platforms that typically use that data to sell signals and advertising to brands and merchants. This is referred to as a shadow data economy and it's time to flip this model on its head.
Ocean Protocol is a platform which creates data marketplaces, providing an alternative to the current model. Data providers can sell their data to the platform to whoever wants to buy it and that data set is represented as a token. The value is a function of the usefulness of that data. This creates a much more equitable market where value flow is more cyclical than one directional.
Trent McConaghy, Founder of Ocean Protocol, joins us to chat about the platform. They have just released V3 which has seen the introduction of the data token, the Ocean Market, and a new home on the Ethereum Mainchain.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/366
Circles UBI is a blockchain-based Universal Basic Income created to promote local economy within communities. It was recently launched on Ethereum’s POA network.
The idea is to create a parallel economy by forming trust lines within Circles. Anyone who joins Circles receives a basic income regularly, without conditions. And the more connected your community is, the more valuable your Circles become. Also it is fully decentralized. What makes Circles special is that it doesn't market itself to anyone specific in crypto. It positions itself as an ecosystem and protocol that can help anyone create and promote a local economy within their local community. In the current economic crisis, this is a hugely powerful tool for societies to utilise.
Martin Köppelmann, CEO of Gnosis, joins us for his third appearance on the show. He is also the creator of Circles and chats to us about why he believes the world needs this, and how the project works.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/365
Alchemy is a powerful blockchain developer platform providing a suite of developer tools. Developers building apps which interact with Ethereum can use Alchemy's powerful APIs to supercharge their apps, and leverage features not available in vanilla nodes. They also provide services like analytics, monitoring, alerting, logging and debugging.
Today, a number of the top Dapps in the Ethereum ecosystem use Alchemy, and the company recently made their API available to the general public. We chatted to Nikil Viswanathan, CEO & Co-founder about the platform, how it works and the problems it solves. We also addressed the concerns around centralization and ecosystem resiliency.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/364
Alameda Research is a quant trading fund founded in 2017. Today it manages over $100 million in digital assets and trades $600 million to $1.5 billion per day across thousands of products: all major coins and altcoins, as well as their derivatives. Whilst running this fund, the team thought there was space for a robust crypto derivatives exchange build for traders which solves some of the issues they saw in derivatives trading. FTX is the crypto derivatives trading platform which came out of Alameda. In just under two years of existence, it has grown to become one of the top trading platforms for crypto, trading over $1B per day in derivatives.
The FTX team are also working on Project Serum. It’s an ambitious project to create a fully decentralized and permissionless DEX and DeFi ecosystem with trustless cross-chain trading. Serum is being built on Solana to allow a centralized orderbook. This offers a much higher speed and throughput than Ethereum. The goal is to create a robust DEX ecosystem which can compete with centralized exchanges on speed, all while being fully interoperable with Ethereum.
Today our guest is Sam Bankman-Fried, he is the CEO of FTX and Alameda Research, and co-founder of Project Serum. We hear all about his journey from Alameda, to FTX, and to his latest venture, Serum.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/363
Adan (Association for the Development of Digital Assets), is an organization which helps promote the development of the crypto industry in France, and more broadly in Europe. Its President, Simon Polrot, is also the Co-founder Ethereum France, which host the EthCC conference in Paris.
The European Commission has released a regulatory proposal, MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets), which falls under The Digital Finance Package. The Adan team have been working hard to understand, dissect and establish positions with regards to this regulation. The scope of this MiCA is vast, and it covers nearly every type of activity which relates to cryptocurrencies, utility tokens, stablecoins, and security tokens in Europe. In addition to being broad, it puts enormous restrictions on the DeFi ecosystem by merely ignoring most decentralized use cases, making it nearly impossible for DeFi to continue existing as we know it. It's an important piece of regulation which would apply to almost every crypto asset company or issuer across the European continent, as well as companies who have customers or do business here.
We chat to Simon who explains what the draft proposal means and the effects it will have on the European crypto industry. He also shares how the community can get involved in steering the regulation in favour of the industry before it's passed into law.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/362
Multicoin Capital is a thesis-driven investment firm that invests in cryptocurrencies, tokens, and blockchain companies. They manage a hedge fund and a venture fund, investing across both public and private markets. They are extremely bullish on smart contract platforms and DeFi is one of their main areas of focus. They've invested in several projects and companies such as Algorand, Arweave, Nervos, Skale, Solana, to name a few.
We originally had Multicoin on the show in February of 2018 when they were still reasonably new and we were in the height of the ICO bubble. Kyle Samani, Co-founder and Managing Partner, joins us back on the show to share not only how Multicoin has changed since then, but also the cryptoasset industry as a whole.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/361
Sögur, formerly known as Saga, aims to provide a global digital currency that acts as a store of value, a unit of account, and a medium of exchange. It is not impacted by any single nation state agenda and complements national currencies. And it is governed by its holders.
The SGR is Sögur's digital coin. It's built to provide a self-sustaining, democratic and global currency. It uses a bonding curve market maker, which is modelled to control and mitigate volatility exposure and value loss when market conditions are fast-changing and unpredictable. All whilst creating an opportunity for sustainable intrinsic value growth. SGR holders are the currency decision makers, and enjoy democratic voting rights over how SGR operates now and as it continues to evolve.
Sögur is interesting as it starts off looking like a stablecoin, but as the market grows it departs from its peg to become a free floating currency. It is currently pegged to the SDR (Special Drawing Rights). Deposits are held in FIAT reserves and as demand for SGR increases, the reserve ratio decreases. This causes the relative price to go up.
Ido Sadeh Man is chairman of the board and founder of Sögur. He joins us on the show to discuss the background of the project and what it is hoping to achieve, and an in depth look into the monetary policy of the SGR. He also talks about the impressive team and advisory board that is behind the project.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. This podcast episode was sponsored by Sögur.
Hidden Forces is a podcast devoted to exploring the underlying forces driving the most powerful changes we see in the world. Demetri Kofinas, host of the show, holds conversations with some of the most brilliant minds in technology, finance, social science, and the hard sciences. He consults blockchain and distributed ledger technology companies, and hedge funds and venture capital firms on how to invest in and around these same emerging technologies.
We chatted to Demetri about a range of current topics from the US presidential election, the financial crisis and the role of the federal reserve and how it's reacting to the crisis. Also the role of central banks going forward in this new reality in which we live. We also discussed crypto and specifically his thoughts on the DeFi space. He has some very interesting views there. Demetri does not hold back on what he wants to say, so this was a fun and interesting conversation which we are sure you will enjoy too!
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/360
NB: Since the recording of this podcast LazyLedger changed their name to Celestia.
Celestia is a scalable general-purpose data availability layer for decentralized apps and trust-minimized sidechains. It is a minimal, viable blockchain which does time stamping and block ordering.
Think back to Bitcoin in the early days, before Ethereum. Layer-2 systems were being built on top of Bitcoin and were leveraging Bitcoin’s consensus layer. This is what Celestia is doing, although it is purpose built and scalable for the exact use case. The implementation details are a lot more complex, and the vision is to create a modular pluggable Layer-1 that does nothing but consensus and data availability. It is designed for people who want to create their blockchain without consensus.
The project is yet to be launched, however we had Ismail Khoffi, Co-Founder and CTO, and Mustafa Al-Bassam, Co-Founder and CEO on the show to give us a deep technical overview and vision of Celestia.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/359
Camila Russo is a financial journalist, starting her career writing for Chile's largest national newspaper. She then spent 8 years at Bloomberg covering the Argentine market from Buenos Aires, the European stocks from Madrid, and analysed macro emerging markets moves for the Markets Live blog in New York.
She is the founder of the Defiant and recently wrote and released a book on the foundations of Ethereum, “The Infinite Machine”. This tells the story of how 19-year-old coding genius Vitalik Buterin led a “ragtag group of feuding hackers with no business plan and no live product” to pioneer a whole new way of raising money, on a platform that’s grown to a value of $27 billion. It is being hailed a complete hit and we highly recommend you give it a read.
Camila joined us to chat about how her journey through journalism led her to crypto, and how she became a successful author.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/358
NuCypher is a decentralized threshold cryptography network offering interfaces and runtimes for secrets management and dynamic access control. It provides cryptographic infrastructure for privacy preserving applications and it exists as a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain. They are currently in testnet but once launched you will be able to use NuCypher to carry out proxy re-encryption.
Proxy re-encryption is a cryptographic method that allows you to delegate re-encryption of data to a third party and in this case validators in the NuCypher network. With this method you issue a re-encryption key that is assigned to a specific public key and a third party has the ability to re-encrypt data for that third party to decrypt. In this case the NuCypher network acts as the third party service. It is useful for when you want to share data, with the ability to revoke access at a later stage.
They also have an interesting token distribution mechanism called the WorkLock. This is similar to a Lockdrop but with work required from the participants.
MacLane Wilkison, Co-founder and CEO of NuCypher talks about how and why the protocl was created, the challenges faced with it, and the problems it solves.
Topics covered in this episode:
- MacLane’s background and how he got into the blockchain space
- Challenges with working with corporate entities and getting people to understand privacy preserving technologies
- The zeroDB protocol and how that led to NuCypher
- What was MacLane’s goal with starting NuCypher
- What proxy re-encryption is and why it’s desirable over manual systems
- What are threshold signatures
- Attributability on the protocol
- Some use cases of using FHE on NuCypher and why they have chosen this for the protocol
- MacLane’s thoughts on trusted hardware
- The infrastructure of NuCypher and why it is on Ethereum
- Results from the testnet
- WorkLock - their token distribution mechanism and how it compares to Lockdrop
- How you can set up a node on NuCypher
- Current gas costs and the impact of this
- The NuCypher business model and how they make money
- Where to learn more about NuCypher
Episode links:
- [NuCypher Website](nucypher.com)
- [NuCypher Discord](https://discord.com/invite/7rmXa3S)
- [NuCypher blog](https://blog.nucypher.com/)
- [WorkLock](https://blog.nucypher.com/the-worklock/)
- [NuCypher Twitter](https://twitter.com/NuCypher)
- [MacLane's Twitter](https://twitter.com/MacLaneWilkison)
Show notes and listening options: [epicenter.tv/357](https://epicenter.tv/357)
Gauntlet is a simulation platform for building financial models of blockchain protocols and applications. Their platform uses machine learning methods to simulate different environments with various user behaviors and see how the system holds up in those conditions. They perform analysis on things like core mechanisms to test for liveness, block propagation, and at higher layers like simulating markets. Their offering is complementary to security audits as their analysis goes beyond code functionality and looks at how systems may behave in real-life conditions.
Tarun Chitra, CEO & Founder of Gauntlet, talks about his previous life in chip manufacturing and how he built Gauntlet. He also goes deep into the machine learning and statistical analysis involved with Gauntlet. It is quite a fascinating concept and when applied to blockchain systems, there is huge potential for this to become something that is expected by users, investors, and the community for new protocols.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/356
Celo has a clear mission - to build a financial system that creates the conditions for prosperity, for everyone. The Celo Foundation is a non-profit organization that supports the growth and development of the open-source, decentralized Celo Platform. Its aim is to build a flexible network of applications built on a blockchain to facilitate payments and remittances to people’s phone numbers. Guided by the Celo community tenets, the Foundation contributes to education, technical research, environmental health, community engagement, and ecosystem outreach. These activities support and encourage an inclusive financial system that solves real-world problems such as lack of access to sound currency, or friction for cash-transfer programs aimed to alleviate poverty.
They are aiming to create a new platform to connect people globally and bring financial stability to those who need it most. Rene Reinsberg and Marek Olszewski, founders of Celo, talk about how they are using blockchain technology to achieve this.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/355
Republic is an investment platform that allows anyone pretty much anywhere in the world, of any income and net worth, to invest in some of the best private equity startups. It allows regular people, not just a few wealthy accredited investors, to invest in highly vetted private startups, with as little as $10 or as much as $100,000 per investment.
In the past, accredited investors were the only ones allowed to invest in startups through equity-based incentives. However the JOBS Act of 2016 created an exemption under the federal securities laws so that crowdfunding can be used to offer and sell securities to the general public. Republic launched just after the JOBS Act was passed with a goal to create an investment platform which was truly accessible to everyone. This was around the time that companies began raising funds with ICOs, and Republic was among the first platforms to offer a framework for Security Token Offerings.
Republic has recently innovated again with their Republic Note product. This is a profit sharing token which allows investors to receive dividends when companies who raise money on the platform make an exit. The tokens are issued by Republic which distributes a portion of the exit profits to investors in proportion to their holdings. This is a similar model to the Binance Token, which isn't surprising since Republic was the first portfolio company of Binance Labs.
Ken Nguyen, Co-founder and CEO of Republic, explains the advantages of crowdfunding over traditional investing, the long term regulatory implications, and the opportunities this model opens up for startup funding.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/353
Republic is an investment platform that allows anyone pretty much anywhere in the world, of any income and net worth, to invest in some of the best private equity startups. It allows regular people, not just a few wealthy accredited investors, to invest in highly vetted private startups, with as little as $10 or as much as $100,000 per investment.
In the past, accredited investors were the only ones allowed to invest in startups through equity-based incentives. However the JOBS Act of 2016 created an exemption under the federal securities laws so that crowdfunding can be used to offer and sell securities to the general public. Republic launched just after the JOBS Act was passed with a goal to create an investment platform which was truly accessible to everyone. This was around the time that companies began raising funds with ICOs, and Republic was among the first platforms to offer a framework for Security Token Offerings.
Republic has recently innovated again with their Republic Note product. This is a profit sharing token which allows investors to receive dividends when companies who raise money on the platform make an exit. The tokens are issued by Republic which distributes a portion of the exit profits to investors in proportion to their holdings. This is a similar model to the Binance Token, which isn't surprising since Republic was the first portfolio company of Binance Labs.
Ken Nguyen, Co-founder and CEO of Republic, explains the advantages of crowdfunding over traditional investing, the long term regulatory implications, and the opportunities this model opens up for startup funding.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/353
SKALE Network's modular protocol is one of the first of its kind to allow developers to build application specific blockchains. These are interoperable and compatible with the Ethereum mainchain, and the entire Ethereum ecosystem. They provide the benefits of decentralization without compromising on computation, storage, or security.
The focus of SKALE Network is slightly different to other scaling solutions, many of which we have had on the show in the past. SKALE Network aims to scale smart contracts, not necessarily transaction throughput. Think of it as a highly performant Ethereum as a service side chain, where developers can deploy their own app specific blockchains. Within the scale network, their dapps will benefit from thousands of TPS with zero gas fees, and addons like file storage. In the future, it’s possible that SKALE will support other addons like machine learning.
Jack O'Holleran, CEO and Co-Founder of SKALE Labs, talks about how they are tackling the scaling issues on Ethereum.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/352
Ampleforth is a cryptocurrency attempting to become an essential building block to an alternative financial ecosystem. The protocol’s native token, AMPL, is a non collateralized cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin, but with a twist: It is supply elastic. This means the token and protocol will automatically increase or decrease the quantity of tokens held in user wallets based on 24 hour weighted volume price. AMPL operates as an ERC-20 token on top of the Ethereum blockchain.
Some claim that the Ampleforth protocol’s implementation of “countercyclical” economic policy makes it a good complimentary collateral because they posit that this mechanism ought to give AMPL a low correlation to the likes of BTC and ETH. Others are not so sure: Does it really make a difference whether you have an inelastic supply without a target price, or an elastic supply with a target price of one? Is AMPL really not correlated to other types of collateral, and should this be so, does it even matter?
There has been a lot of chatter about Ampleforth in recent months. Is it legit, or is it a scam, 'HEX with Stanford credentials', as one pundit commented? We spoke with the co-founder Evan Kuo, who attempts to explain how it all works and straighten out misconceptions surrounding the protocol.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/351
Balancer is a generalized automated market maker (AMM) protocol built on Ethereum. It allows anyone to create or add liquidity to customizable pools and earn trading fees. On one side there are liquidity providers (LPs) that generally seek to balance their holdings, and they get rewarded with trading fees. On the other side, traders that are looking for the best rate possible.
One way to look at Balancer is as a generalization of Uniswap, however Balancer pools aren't restricted to the same 50/50 split between 2 tokens. A Balancer pool can support up to 8 tokens with any weights. It supports smart order routing which ensures trades get sent to the pools which provide the best rate possible. They can be seen as self balancing index funds which pay you for contributing liquidity to the platform. Instead of paying fees to portfolio managers to rebalance your portfolio, you collect fees from traders, who continuously rebalance your portfolio by following arbitrage opportunities.
The inner workings are quite complex but CEO & Co-founder of Balancer, Fernando Martinelli, breaks down the token economics and governance of the protocol for us.
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This episode is hosted by Sunny Aggarwal & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/350
UMA, or Universal Market Access, is an open source financial contracts protocol for building synthetic assets. It allows any two counterparties to design and create their own financial contracts for derivatives. An example of these assets in the traditional finance world, are interest rate derivatives. These are used to hedge against fluctuations in currency exchange rates. Today, interest rate derivatives are commonly used and the contracts to create these are standardized. Similarly, UMA allows anyone to create a derivative on a blockchain. Enforcement of agreement will be enforced by the network and so will settlement.
What’s unique about UMA is how it ensures proper collateralization of derivatives. Maker and other platforms based on collateralized positions use a price oracle and will automatically liquidate positions if they go below a certain threshold. UMA is ‘priceless’ and does not use an on-chain price feed as the primary means to determine proper collateralization. Rather, it incentivizes participants to identify improperly collateralized positions. UMA token holders essentially vote on the price.
Allison Lu, co-founder of UMA, chats in-depth about the platform and provides a great introduction to the world of financial derivatives.
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This episode is hosted by Sunny Aggarwal & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/349
Numerai, the "hardest data science tournament on the planet". It's a hedge fund with its own distributed research platform designed specifically for AIs. It's the first of its kind and takes a radically different approach to making market predictions. It's completely crowd-sourced and data scientists around the world compete to create the best predictions and get paid with cryptocurrencies. Users are completely blind to the data and Numerai is blind to the code, and the predictive models users generate. The result is a hedge fund which is market neutral, currency neutral, and geography neutral. It makes all decisions solely on the data.
Richard Craib, Founder of Numerai, was first on the show 3 years ago when the project's token, Numeraire, was just launched. Since then they have released a number of additions to the network including Numerai Signals and Erasure Bay, with plenty more in the pipeline.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/348
Polkadot is a unique protocol connecting multiple purpose-built blockchains into one scalable network. It's using blockchain technology to make way for new markets and future decentralized economies and has many stand out features. It's a sharded multichain network enabling many transactions on several chains in parallel. It offers interoperability and cross-chain communication. Communities on Polkadot govern their own network, and hold a stake in the future of Polkadot’s network governance as a whole. It also enables forkless upgrades, allowing blockchains to evolve and adapt easily. Over 100 projects have been or are currently being built for the Polkadot ecosystem, in a wide range of services and systems.
After being in the development stage for 3 years, Polkadot was launched earlier this year. It's the first project by Web3 Foundation, and Parity are behind the development. Dieter Fishbein, Head of Ecosystem Development at Web3 Foundation, and Joe Petrowski, Research Analyst at Parity Technologies, share an in depth overview on the economics and incentives behind the protocol.
Polkadot is designed to take back our digital sovereignty from powerful third-parties who currently control the web. It promises to take blockchain technology to the next level, and we believe it will do just that.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/347
Just like all software, smart contracts on the blockchain are subject to serious security vulnerabilities and coding errors. The fact however that smart contracts are often directly in charge of assets and cannot be changed once they are on the blockchain, makes secure development and running essential. Some smart contract platforms have their own languages, for example Solidity in Ethereum. Bugs and vulnerabilities in the source code, and errors in the virtual machines used by the network, are the main reasons behind security issues in smart contracts.
Projects using blockchain applications should expect constant changes in the security landscape. New bugs, security risks, and best practices will continue to emerge over time. Trail of Bits is a software security firm who advise in a range of industries for some top companies, including in the blockchain space. They are experts at identifying top-level risks and implementation vulnerabilities, and providing essential recommendations on best practices. Dan Guido, the CEO and Co-founder, explains all things software security in a really detailed and technical, yet easy to digest way. We also recommend you check out their exceptional blog packed with invaluable resources.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/346
Nexus Mutual provides an alternative decentralized insurance solution for Ethereum. The protocol is built on the public chain and operates under a discretionary mutual structure meaning it is owned wholly by its members. It allows anyone to become a member and buy cover, and the model encourages engagement as members receive incentives for participating in Risk Assessment, Claims Assessment and Governance. At present the product offered is cover to protect against hacks in smart contract code. When Nexus Mutual is alerted to a claim, members will also be asked to vote on whether to pay out on that claim or not.
Hugh Karp, the CEO and Founder of Nexus Mutual, has combined his insurance industry knowledge with his passion for decentralized technology to build this platform which is replacing the traditional insurance setup. They are currently looking into expanding to offer more insurance products and we are excited to see where they go next.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/345
Opyn is a smart contract-based insurance platform built on a generalized (supports both put and call) options protocol called Convexity. It is intended as a platform to protect DeFi users against both technical and financial risks, and a place where ETH holders can earn substantial premiums on their holdings by providing insurance.
Opyn uses tokenized ERC20 put options, oTokens, on ETH to allow option buyers to keep their upside while limiting their downside. If you buy Opyn protection, you are buying “the right but not the obligation to sell an asset at a pre-specified price”. Currently, you can buy insurance for DAI, ETH, and USDC deposits on Compound and it is completely noncustodial and trustless.
Zubin Koticha, CEO & Co-founder of Opyn, is currently working on V2 of the platform with his team. Their focus for improvements are in 3 main areas; cash efficiency, trading mechanism, and network effects. They are hoping to release this within the next 6 months.
This is a much-needed generalizable insurance solution against some attacks/ vulnerabilities within the DeFi ecosystem and it will be very interesting to see how their contribution to DeFi progresses.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/344
In late 2017, Gabriel Jimenez was approached by the Venezuelan presidency and asked to create a national digital currency, the Petro. Although very much against the regime, Gabriel saw this as a chance to save his country which was on the brink of economic collapse. A new currency that would move freely over an open network, like Bitcoin. And the government would not be able to control it. So he agreed.
Things didn’t go as Gabriel had envisioned. Months later, Gabriel almost paid with his life when he was held at gunpoint by military guards in the President’s palace. He was accused of being a traitor to the government and was forced to hand over the project, which still hasn’t taken off. Last year he fled to the US to avoid being arrested and has since been granted asylum status. He is passionate about cryptocurrency and his country, and is working on a new way to combine the two.
From the safety of the US, Gabriel is finally able to share his side of the story and wants to set the record straight on why he did what he did.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/343
We've heard it over and over again, Covid-19 has plunged us into a crisis like none other we’ve experienced in our lifetime. Although it is primarily a public health issue, it is also having a major impact on the global economy and financial system. Many businesses have been forced to shut down sparking debates on whether this is supply or demand shock.
Wall Street proclaims that any increase in economic activity is a good sign. However, Jim Bianco, President and Macro Strategist at Bianco Research, says a return to 90% of pre-crisis level will still not be enough to recover. Bianco Research is a Chicago-based firm that provides research and analysis for institutional finance. Jim started to take serious notice of the Covid-19 outbreak back in January. Since then he has been sharing his views on the long- term, macroeconomic consequences of the pandemic. He brings an enormous amount of clarity and insight into this issue.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/342
In this inaugural post-interview chat, Friederike and Sebastien discuss their recent interview with Arweave Co-founder and CEO, Sam Williams.
Moving forward, these conversations will be released every week on Substack. Subscribe to never miss an episode at https://epicenter.rocks/substack
The internet was originally created as a platform to communicate freely, but it soon became a place where people could be monitored, controlled, and censored. 98% of content on the internet is deleted every 20 years. More surprisingly, based on a Twitter study, a third of links change their content fundamentally or are removed completely, within three months of their creation.
Arweave is a new data storage protocol that enables economically sustainable permanence for the very first time. Built on a blockchain-like structure called the blockweave, one of the applications on Arweave is what they have coined “the permaweb”. This is an array of data, websites, and decentralised applications, to which anyone can contribute and maintain. This system provides an incentive to store your data without compromising your privacy, solving one of the key issues facing the current web.
Sam Williams, Co-founder & CEO of Arweave, talks about the technical solution they have built, the economic model around endowment, and the ethical and philosophical questions the permanence of information against concepts like “the right to be forgotten” raises.
Topics covered in this episode:
- Sam’s background and how he got into the blockchain space
- Breaking down BitTorrent – the first scalable decentraized file sharing system
- Data sustainability on the web and what should be kept
- Arweave under the hood and what is a blockweave
- How data is stored and retrieved in blocks
- Arweave’s economics and incentive model
- Data replication within the infrastructure and ensuring decentralization in the future
- The AR tokens and how the Arweave endowment works
- Arweave vs Skynet vs IPFS
- Does Arweave help with the data availability problem in Ethereum?
- Arweave's business model
- Community projects that Arweave are involved with and what’s next for the project
Episode links:
- [Arweave website](https://www.arweave.org/)
- [Welcome to the Permaweb](https://medium.com/@arweave/welcome-to-the-permaweb-ce0e6c73ddfb)
- [Arweave Whitepaper](https://www.arweave.org/files/arweave-lightpaper.pdf)
- [Arweave on Medium](https://medium.com/@arweave)
- [Arweave Twitter](https://twitter.com/ArweaveTeam)
- [Sam Williams Twitter](https://twitter.com/samecwilliams)
- [Mainnet 2020 – Messari's Flagship Crypto Event (June 1 to 3)](https://mainnet.events)
- [Free tickets to Web 3.0 Forum (June 8 to 10)](https://ti.to/cogx/cogx-2020/discount/TPDODSFP100)
- [Casual meetup for friends of Epicenter](https://epicenter.rocks/virtualmeetup)
Sponsors:
- ShapeShift: ShapeShift is the leading crypto platform offering zero-commission trading - https://shapeshift.com/
This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: [epicenter.tv/341](https://epicenter.tv/341
Today, half of the internet is built on top of Amazon S3. Although the cloud has allowed Internet applications to scale, centralized infrastructure means less control over one's own data. And when it goes down, so does half of the internet.
Sia CEO David Vorick is back on the podcast to talk about a new product recently released by their team: Skynet. Skynet builds on Sia and enables web applications to be developed and deployed over a decentralized data storage infrastructure. David also shares his thoughts on Trusted Setups, why he thinks they're "busted," and how the crypto industry can create better and more secure Zero-Knowledge primitives.
Topics covered in this episode:
- What is Skynet and how it builds on Sia
- Skynet compared to IPFS/Filecoin
- The need for a decdentralized data marketplace
- An example of how the Sia network works
- What are trusted setups and how they are used
- Threat models in trusted setups and what can happen when they break
- The alternative to trusted setups and solutions for the future
Episode links:
- [Sia Website](https://sia.tech/)
- [Sia Blog](https://blog.sia.tech/)
- [Decentralization & Cutting-Edge Cryptography - Starkware Sessions Talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naw0HajYDxI)
- [David Vorick on Twitter](https://twitter.com/davidvorick)
- [Sia on Twitter](https://twitter.com/SiaTechHQ)
- [Epicenter Virtual Meetup on May 29](https://epicenter.rocks/virtualmeetup)
This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: [epicenter.tv/B005](https://epicenter.tv/B005)
Decentralized exchanges have been around for some time, and various designs have been attempted. Although they provide a number of privacy and censorship resistance benefits, one of their pitfalls has been transaction throughput. However, recent advancements in Zero-Knowledge Proof-based scaling solutions is creating a new breed of scalable DEXes.
Loopring is a non-custodial DEX protocol that achieves high-throughput trading. It leverages ZK-Rollups to achieve upwards of 2,000 transactions per second with on-chain settlement. As an order book-based exchange, it sets itself apart from other DEXes like Uniswap and the Gnosis Protocol. However, users should keep in mind that the orderbook is centralized. Daniel Wang, Founder & CEO of Loopring, talks about why they decided to focus on DEXes and their plans beyond the current version 3.0.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/340
Julian Assange, the creator of WikiLeaks, is currently in a maximum-security prison in London facing extradition to the US for violating the Espionage Act. This charge came, among other things, from exposing US war crimes in Iraq. This has put journalists around the world under fear of being prosecuted for exposing the truth. Opinions on Julian Assange are divided, unsurprisingly. But we can assume that a conviction would set a dangerous precedent for journalism, free press, and freedom of speech.
John Shipton, Julian's father, is seeking support from the crypto community to help fund Julian's legal defense. Harry Halpin, CEO of Nym Technologies and friend of Julian's, teams up with John to discuss how a conviction could jeopardize the values of censorship resistance, permissionless innovation, and privacy.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/339
Genesis Mining is a leading hash power provider offering cloud cryptocurrency mining as a service. They offer mining for Bitcoin, Zcash, Dash, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Monero and serve over 2 million users in 100+ countries. The company was formed in 2013 and saw tremendous growth in its seven years in operation. In the mining business, process optimization, controlling costs, and vertical integration are key. Crypto prices, difficulty adjustments, hardware availability – all can have an impact on profits.
Co-founder & CEO Marco Streng shares how he built his company from the ground up, and is now expanding beyond crypto to address other profitable markets in cloud computing.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/338
Aave is building a suite of non-custodial DeFi tools that allow users to earn interest on their deposits and borrow assets. Earlier this year, Aave released its Flash Loans feature, which is drumming up a lot of excitement in the ecosystem. Flash Loans have a number of applications like executing liquidations or refinancing and require no collateral on the part of the borrower. As we have seen since they were introduced, they have also been used by malicious actors to exploit vulnerabilities in some DeFi protocols. Nevertheless, this powerful tool is an important “money lego” component that enables various new use cases. Stani Kulechov, Aave Founder & CEO, and Marc Zeller, Integrations Lead, explain their vision for the Aave protocol as an essential part of the DeFi ecosystem.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/337
The Plasma Group was a not for profit research group focussing on layer-2 scaling on Ethereum. Optimism is a new Public Benefit Corporation that builds on the lessons of the Plasma research and is implementing Optimistic Rollups. This solution scales Eth 1.x and offers near-instant transaction finality on Ethereum, while providing over 100x transaction throughput. Jinglan Wang and Karl Floersch, co-founders of Optimism, explain the transition to this new entity and its goals moving forward.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/336
AZTEC Protocol is a protocol that enables private transactions on Ethereum. At its core, AZTEC is an Ethereum contract, otherwise known as the AZTEC Cryptography Engine. The protocol uses a zero-knowledge proof system, allowing users to effectively create shielded representations of tokens, which can then be sent and redeemed for the underlying token. CEO and CTO, Tom Pocock and Zac Williamson have plans to build AZTEC into a fully functional DeFi stack with which all kinds of trades, swaps, and financial operations will be possible, with privacy.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/335
Ryan Sean Adams is the Founder of Mythos Capital, a crypto fund and staking provider for “big fish” stakeholders. He also writes the popular DeFi newsletter, Bankless. In addition to providing excellent insights about the ecosystem, Bankless takes a very practical approach to leveraging DeFi. Ryan shares strategies and encourages readers to complete action items to utilize the full potential of decentralized finance and become bankless. He also hosts a podcast by the same name with David Hoffman.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/334
In another of our bonus episodes recorded at EthCC in Paris, we caught up with Jason Goldberg, CEO and Founder of Pepo and Ost, and James Dyer, Co-founder and Head of Product at Decrypt. At the time of recording Decrypt were about to announce they were launching their own token that rewards audience engagement, built on Ost technology. We chatted to Jason and James about this relationship, the problems solved by these monetization models, the link between Pepo and Decrypt tokens, and DeFi, and what the future holds for media and tokens.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture.
What will the World look like when capital is no longer scarce? In his book, World After Capital, Albert Wenger makes the case that technological progress throughout the ages (foraging, agrarian, industrial) brought a change in scarcities. As society transitions from the Industrial Age to the Age of Knowledge, scarcities will also shift – human attention will become our most valued scarce resource.
Albert Wenger is a Managing Partner at the VC firm Union Square Ventures. A graduate of Harvard and MIT, he holds a Ph.D. in Information Technology. Before joining USV, he founded several companies in the aughts, and was the President of del.icio.us when the company was sold to Yahoo! in 2005.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/333
We caught up with Joseph Lubin, Founder of ConsenSys, at this year's EthCC. It has been over a year since he last came on the show, and we wanted to get his take on what has been happening in the ecosystem since then. We talked about the ConsenSys reorganization, interoperability between public and permission blockchains and the opportunities there, government-backed stable coins and the possibilities of nation-states building their own, DeFi and the phenomenal growth in the ecosystem, his predictions for 2020, and thoughts on the challenges facing Eth2.0.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/ethcc-joe-lubin
In this episode we are joined by David Hoffman, Chief of Operations at RealT, a company which tokenizes realestate assets into security tokens. He is also well known for numerous pieces he has written on Ethereum and DeFi and is co-host of the POV Crypto podcast. Hear us as we talk about his writings, how tokenizing real estate assets works, Bitcoin on Ethereum, the feedback loop problem and effects of the USD in DeFi, and a debate on whether Ether is an asset.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/332
This week we have a special episode on the entire globe's most talked about topic, the Corona Virus. We are joined by guest Ryan Selkis, CEO of Messari. Ryan was one of the first people in the space to start talking about Covid19 and has been very vocal on this subject on Twitter and his newsletter since the crisis began in January. We discuss how this virus has become so deadly and the current health and economic conditions, containment and protecting yourself, how the markets, crypto and startups have been affected, and what is yet to come.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/331
This episode was recorded at the third annual Ethereum Community Conference in Paris last week and we were joined by Gonçalo Sá, Co-founder of ConsenSys Diligence, Jérôme de Tychey, President of Ethereum France, and Cassidy Daly, Token Designer at Centrifuge. We discussed the issues surrounding centralization and DeFi in token governance, the security complexities of composability attacks like the ones we saw recently which leveraged flash loans, and of course, the coronavirus.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/episodes/bonus-ethcc-3
We are joined by founder of TQ Tezos, Jacob Arluck. TQ Tezos is a company that works to advance the Tezos ecosystem by creating open source software and other public goods. It's been over two years since we last did an episode about Tezos and this was a good refresher on how that project is shaping up. We hear about the decentralized and permissionless nature of the Tezos infrastructure, the protocol development of Tezos, and how TQ is working to make Tezos more accessible.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/330
Joe Lallouz is the CEO of Bison Trails, who provide staking infrastructure for a variety of PoS blockchains. They have built a really impressive system for deploying nodes across multiple cloud services. In light of the $25m recently raised by Bison Trails, Joe shares their vision to build a better PoS ecosystem for everyone, the types of customer they run validators for, and the cutting edge stuff they're working on in terms of deployment, redundancy and key storage. We also hear their view on infrastructure centralization in PoS, protocol improvements, and Bison Trails' role with Libra Association.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/329
Income tax. Not a particularly exciting topic, especially when it comes to paying them. But something we all need to deal with nevertheless. We are all (or at least should be) aware of what our personal tax returns entail. But are you fully aware of the implications holding crypto can have on your tax filing?
Clinton Donnelly, Founder of CryptoTaxAudit has done hundreds of tax returns for US citizens, both domestic and expatriated, and is an expert when dealing with filing crypto and Bitcoin taxes. He is also an Enrolled Agent, which means he meets the requirements of the IRS to represent taxpayers. Clinton has seen it all, and there's no situation too complicated.
In our interview with Clinton, we explored the ins and outs of crypto taxes for US citizens – it was an information-rich conversation. US taxpayers who hold crypto will learn what they need to report to the IRS, as well as the practical, concrete actions one can take to make sure they are complying with the Tax Code of the United States of America.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. This podcast episode was sponsored by CryptoTaxAudit.com.
Gabriel Shapiro is an independent attorney who has spent the last two years focusing on the tokens and crypto. He has published several pieces diving deep into US Securities Law, in which he shares his vision and philosophy for how Tokenized Networks should be regulated. In light of the recent “safe harbor” framework proposed by SEC Commissioner Hester Pierce, Gabriel offers his thoughts and suggests how these measures could be improved in a way that would benefit the entire industry.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/328
Decentralized finance (DeFi) is continuing on its remarkable path to the broad adoption of permissionless financial services. While many people celebrated passing $1 billion locked in DeFi products at the start of February 2020, only a week later, an additional $200 million had entered the ecosystem.
DeFi products thus far have proven useful to early adopters with the resilience and knowhow required to navigate the often clunky user experience of Web 3.0. Companies like Argent are building the interface and user experience essential for the masses, with a vision to bring a billion people into the future of finance.
Itamar Lesuisse, Co-founder and CEO of Argent, joins us to discuss his vision of the future of DeFi, and the necessity to build products that enable intuitive, secure, and permissionless access to finance for anyone with a smartphone.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/327
While recent blockchain launches seem to leverage various Proof of Stake consensus mechanisms, some believe Satoshi’s consensus mechanism is optimal for distributed protocols. As decentralized ledgers jockey to become the chain of choice for enterprises looking to leverage blockchain technology, projects are looking to offer a solution that maximizes security, decentralization, and transaction throughput.
Kevin Wang, a Co-founder of Nervos, joins us to discuss why Proof of Work was implemented as the consensus mechanism for the network. To enable greater flexibility for application developers, Nervos created a Common Knowledge Base (CKB) to focus on the security of assets, enabling a complementary layer of Virtual Machines (VM) to scale and facilitate computation.
Kevin also discusses the active initiatives underway with the Nervos Grants Program to foster ecosystem development and encourage developers to evolve the permissionless network.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/326
Like previous crypto winters, those actually building the ecosystem have been working diligently to create applications with industry-changing potential. The year 2020 may prove to be the year of Decentralized Finance (DeFi), with many exciting projects re-creating financial products common to the world of traditional finance, in the open and permissionless blockchain space.
Synthetic assets enable exposure to the price action of an asset without actually holding the underlying asset. Kain Warick is the Founder of Synthetix, a company creating synthetic assets for DeFi, enabling exposure to fiat currencies, commodities (gold and silver), and cryptocurrencies. They have large aspirations to create synthetic assets for many more things, including traditional equities.
Synthetic equities in DeFi is a massive opportunity that demands everyone's attention. Once traditional equities become accessible in DeFi, anyone in the world with internet access will be able to gain exposure to financial products currently only available to the privileged few with access to markets like the Nasdaq or NYSE.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/325
Many within the cryptofinance industry have been patiently waiting for regulatory oversight to deliver the clarity required for institutional adoption. Recent updates by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which issues guidelines for 200 countries and territories, attempts to apply the same rules and regulations required of traditional finance to the world of virtual currencies.
Yaya Fanusie's background as an intelligence analyst at the CIA, and research on the national security implications of cryptocurrencies, provide valuable insight into the necessity of regulation in the space to mitigate the risk of bad actors. Yaya discusses the history and evolution of “Know Your Customer” and where he believes the industry is heading as it faces policymakers who attempt to regulate such rapid technological change.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/324
The blockchain trilemma is the generally accepted concept that it's not possible to scale public and permissionless blockchains without compromising on security, decentralization, or both.
While the industry seems focused on building Layer 2 solutions to scale the transaction capacity of public networks, Algorand believes it has solved the trilemma, offering a network that scales without compromise to security or decentralization.
Silvio Micali, Algorand's Founder and Head of Research, as well as the company's CEO, Steven Kokinos, discuss the project's background, recent protocol upgrades, and how Algorand will create a great ecosystem for developers.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/323
Governance within any community has been a work in progress for humanity's history. The blockchain ecosystem continues to develop and offer an alternative to today's centralized powers. With this, distributed projects and technologies will need to enact clear governance to ensure viable competition with the streamlined decision-making processes present in today's institutions.
The absence of codified governance in Bitcoin may be one of its most significant traits, signaling to the world its predictability due to its inability to change drastically. New projects like Edgeware, however, hope to encode the rules of governance on-chain and ensure a transparent process for stakeholders wishing to participate.
Edgeware is a smart contract platform built on Polkadot's Substrate. Focused on developing community-owned governance tools, Edgeware is a distributed project where participants use the tools themselves to vote, delegate, and fund each other to upgrade the network. While initially developed by Commonwealth Labs, Edgeware at launch will be entirely managed by the community, which holds 90% of the tokens and resulting influence.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/322
Charlie Shrem became fascinated with Bitcoin in 2011 but grew frustrated with the hassle of buying it from the leading exchange at the time, Mt. Gox. To make the process faster and more convenient, Charlie created BitInstant in 2012. BitInstant quickly grew and by 2013 became responsible for processing a third of all Bitcoin transactions. This was with the help of Roger Ver and the Winklevoss twins, who were his seed investors, and Erik Voorhees, who led their marketing efforts.
The success of BitInstant was short-lived. In a time where Bitcoin's primary applications were price speculation and buying things on the Silk Road, Charlie spent time in prison after a lack of customer due-diligence attracted the attention of the law enforcement. Our conversation with Charlie recounts the Bitcoin industry at its beginning, his time in prison, and what he is doing now that he's able to continue his work as a Bitcoin advocate.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/321
With global commerce and finance continuing to digitize, the world’s borders are seemingly becoming more fluid, even as physical walls are built. How does this globalization affect the sovereignty of nation-states and their ability to democratically direct their own economic future?
In a panel moderated by Epicenter host, Sunny Aggarwal, we explore the interpretation of monetary policy from a global context, discuss the morality of impacting other nations, and the potential for new technologies to offer alternatives in a dollar-dominated world. The conversation includes Jae Kwon, CEO of Tendermint; John P Conley, Professor at Vanderbilt University; Steve Randy Waldman, Author of Interfluidity, and Baek Kim, Senior Associate at Hashed.
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This episode is hosted by Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/320
Managing crypto-assets can be an anxiety-inducing experience for a lot of people. While it's quite empowering to “be your own bank,” it's also scary for a lot of people who understand the risks associated with self-custody. Although cryptocurrency wallets have made tremendous progress since the days when a full-sync of the blockchain was required, there are still significant hurdles that limit broad adoption.
This conversation on the future of wallets at SF Blockchain Week Epicenter conference includes Taylor Monahan of MyCrypto, David Gold of FIO Protocol, Dan Finlay of MetaMask, and Ouriel Ohayon of ZenGo. They discuss design, app store policies, and the evolution necessary to enable more people to send, receive, and manage their tokens confidently. The panel is moderated by Epicenter host Sebastien Couture.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/319
Much of the digital world now operates in the cloud. A handful of companies are responsible for the massive market, and the centralization makes many people worry about censorship, privacy, and network resilience.
David Vorick’s passion for distributed file storage had him start Sia in 2014. He’s been working fervently ever since to develop a viable competitor to the centralized solutions that are responsible for much of the content on the internet today. David aim’s to create a more private, resilient, and secure alternative to Amazon Web Services while also outperforming it.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/318
Many people find that the crypto-finance space is quite difficult for non-technical people to understand and interact with the technologies. Some projects and people have made tremendous progress in creating tools and interfaces that allow a broader audience to participate, speculate, and learn.
Taylor Monahan started MyEtherWallet as a side project in 2015, only for it to grow into one of the significant pieces of software people used to participate in the 2017 ICO boom. She has since "design-forked" the codebase and created MyCrypto, an open-source tool for generating ether wallets, handling ERC-20 tokens, and interacting with the blockchain with a clean and intuitive design.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/317
We were joined by Luka Mueller, who played a key role in establishing Switzerland as a cryptocurrency center and in laying the legal groundwork for the ICO boom. In 2014, his law firm MME worked with the Ethereum team to set up the Ethereum Foundation and run its public fundraiser. A model that was later copied by countless other projects and led MME to work with many other leading protocols like Cosmos and Tezos.
We also discussed his new project Sygnum, a cryptocurrency-focused bank. Nearly every company that works in the cryptocurrency space has had problems with its banking partner. Legal uncertainty, lack of knowledge, or simple unwillingness to work with cryptocurrency companies has made this a frequent nightmare for companies in this emerging sector. With a presence in both Switzerland and Singapore, Sygnum aims to fill a piece of missing infrastructure in the crypto-ecosystem: a bank that is able to receive, hold and transfer protocol tokens while offering a secure fiat gateway to easily transfer from the old world of finance to the new.
We also discussed Switzerland’s regulatory environment and why it is able to provide more regulatory clarity.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/316
As the crypto ecosystem continues to grow, wallets and exchanges are quickly evolving to differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace. Viktor Radchenko, CEO and founder of Trust Wallet, joins us this week to talk about why he created a noncustodial wallet solution, what makes Trust Wallet unique, and how the acquisition by Binance has allowed his team to focus on a long term vision. Viktor helps us understand what it means to be part of the Binance Ecosystem, and what he believes the future holds for wallets, key storage and custody.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/315
Bitmain is one of the most well known, and one of the most polarizing companies in the blockchain space. The largest ASIC manufacturer and operator of several mining pools, Bitmain is the center of many controversies and discussions around centralization in the space. But not only is it the subject of discussion, Bitmain breaks out of the “passive miner” stereotype and is very active in many of the discussions in the community, most notably the Great Scaling Debates.
In this episode, we sit down with Nishant Sharma, Head of Community Relations, who is responsible for acting as a bridge between the Bitmain company and the many communities it interacts with through its mining and ASIC operations. We explore the origins of Bitmain and its founders, the economics of ASIC production, its past and current relationships with different communities, and the future of the company.
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This episode is hosted by Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/314
As the cryptocurrency space has grown, exchanges have become the dominant juggernauts of the industry. One of the earliest and most reputable exchanges is Kraken. From the company's formation in 2011, Kraken has grown to 4m users and almost 1,000 employees.
We are joined by Kraken Founder and CEO Jesse Powell. We dove into the history of Kraken, their values and the vision that's driving them.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/313
The vision of a world computer on which anyone can deploy smart contracts has captured our imagination since the publication of the Ethereum whitepaper. But while Ethereum demonstrated the viability of the concept, its shortcomings in terms of capacity and throughput prevent it from realizing the vision. Today, throughput has become a major bottleneck for widescale adoption of decentralized technologies.
Many projects have set out to deliver where Ethereum 1.0 falls short. Most projects, including Ethereum 2.0, aim to create some kind of sharded network with many interoperable chains. Solana may be the only project that went the other way. Through identifying every performance bottleneck for a single blockchain and developing novel ways of removing them, they target to achieve throughput of 50,000 tps.
We were joined by Solana creator and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko to discuss Solana's approach to building a web-scale blockchain. We covered some of their novel ideas including proof-of-history and parallelizing smart contract execution.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy & Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/312
Blockchain and cryptocurrencies have the potential to change the world in meaningful ways. And this change may drastically impact people’s lives – both for the better and for the worse. While ethics are often discussed for technologies like AI, the ethical considerations around blockchain technologies have received less focussed attention.
We’re joined by Rhys Lindmark, Head of Community and Long-Term Societal Impact at the MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative. Previously the host of the podcast “Creating a Humanist Blockchain Future,” Rhys’ approach to blockchain was always about considering its potential impact. Since joining the DCI, his podcast, now “Gray Mirror,” continues to explore these questions. He has also recently started teaching a blockchain ethics course with the DCI’s Director, Neha Narula.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/311
This past year, we have witnessed what some are calling a “Cambrian Explosion” in zero-knowledge proof systems. New proof systems based on a variety of cryptographic assumptions are popping up every week. And while zero-knowledge systems are known for their privacy-preserving characteristics, they have proven particularly useful for scaling blockchains through off-chain computations.
We're joined by Eli Ben Sasson, Co-founder and Cheif Scientist in the East at Starkware. His company is developing a full proof-stack, which leverages STARKs. Pioneered by Eli, STARKs are zero-knowledge cryptographic proofs, which are succinct, transparent, and post-quantum secure. StarkWare has demonstrated how zkSTARKs may be leveraged to provide off-chain scalability by generating proofs of computational integrity which may be verified on-chain.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/310
We’re joined by Yoni Assia, Founder and CEO of eToro. The concept behind this world-leading social trading platform is users invest smarter by automatically copying the top traders in the community. With over 10 million users, over a trillion dollars traded on the platform just last year alone, this fascinating approach to trading is making huge waves. A decade after its original launch, eToro entered the crypto space with eToroX, their crypto exchange. More recently, they added cryptocurrencies to the growing list of assets that users can add to “Copy Trades.” Yoni shares his long-term vision in which he sees the tokenization of all traditional asset classes eventually taking place.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/309
As we take some time to record new interviews, we’re releasing content from DappCon which took place in Berlin in August. This week, you’ll hear a panel moderated by Sunny all about blockchain governance.
The panelists where Ameen Soleimani of MolochDAO, Stephanie Hurder of Prysm Group, Jorge Izquierdo of Aragon One, and Sebastian Gajek of ditCraf.
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This episode is hosted by Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/308
As we take some time to record new interviews, we're releasing content from DappCon which took place in Berlin in August. This week, you'll hear a panel moderated by Sebastien on usability and user experience in blockchain-based apps and products.
The panelists where Chriss Sugg of AirSwap, Alex Van de Sande of the Ethereum Foundation, Itamar Lesuisse or Argent and Pedro Gomez of Wallet Connect.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/307
Those who have been in crypto long enough remember the not-so-good-ol’ days when an air-gapped machine was the only way to store private keys securely. Thankfully, the wallet space has come a long way from that era. But we still live in a world where the seed phrase is the single atomic point of failure. Enter threshold signatures schemes (TSS), a multi-party computation (MPC) where different parties generate a key and are all required to create a valid signature.
We’re joined by Omer Shlomovits and Ouriel Ohayon, Co-founders of ZenGo. Their product is a ‘keyless’ crypto wallet, which means users never need to generate or store a key which gives them access to their funds. Keys are created with an MPC, where both ZenGo and the user are required to sign a transaction. TTS opens up exciting new possibilities like social recovery, user permissions for teams, and inheritance planning schemes. The important distinction between ZenGo and existing multi-signature wallets is that they achieve this using only cryptography, and do not rely on on-chain elements like smart contracts or op_scriptSig in Bitcoin.
Topics covered in this episode:
- Omer and Ouriel’s respective backgrounds in academia and online consumer-facing products
- What lead them to want to build yet another crypto wallet
- The state of custody in the crypto wallet ecosystem and the challenge which remain unaddressed
- A quick refresh on cryptographic primitives and multi-party computations (MPC)
- The building blocks of cryptographic signatures and threshold signature schemes (TSS)
- How TSS is different from Bitcoin multi-sig and smart contract multi-sig
- TSS in ECDSA vs. Schnorr signatures
- Applications and use cases for TSS
- ZenGo’s on-boarding, restore process and use of biometrics
- The future of wallet interoperability in a world of proprietary cryptographic schemes
Episode links:
- [ZenGo: Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency Wallet](https://zengo.com)
- [ZenGo: Bitcoin & Crypto Wallet on the App Store](https://Zengo.com/enjoy)
- [Threshold Signatures Explained](https://www.binance.vision/security/threshold-signatures-explained)
- [ShareLock: Mixing for Cryptocurrencies from Multiparty ECDSA](https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/563.pdf)
- [KZen Networks on GitHub](https://github.com/KZen-networks)
- [Zengo Research](https://zengo.com/research/)
- [KZen Research Telegram Group](https://t.me/kzen_research)
- [Tel Aviv Blockchain Week Recap with Anna Rose of the Zero Knowledge Podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccywXWTSFKM)
Sponsors:
- Vaultoro: Trade gold to Bitcoin instantly and securely starting at just 1mg - http://vaultoro.com
- Trail of Bits: Trust the team at the forefront of blockchain security research - https://trailofbits.com
This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: [epicenter.tv/306](https://epicenter.tv/306)
We're joined by Sharon Goldberg, CEO of Arwen, a protocol solution for non-custodial trading. From communications engineering to Internet protocol security, to then becoming a Professor at Boston University, she shares her journey into the world of cryptography. Beginning as a whitepaper on eclipse attacks, Arwen has grown into a platform enabling atomic swaps on centralized exchanges. Sharon chats about Arwen's integration with KuCoin, how it compares to ShapeShift, Interledger, and Lightning, and the exciting new release of the Layer-2 atomic swaps from Ethereum into Bitcoin.
Topics covered in this episode:
- How Sharon became interested in blockchain technology
- The meaning of an eclipse attack
- Arwen's co-founder Ethan Heilman
- The backbone of Arwen
- The Arwen protocol and how it uses atomic swaps
- How trading takes place on the exchange
- Arwen vs Shapeshift and Interledger
- Creating multiple orders using the same channel
- Arwen vs Lightning and the use of SegWit
- How the relationship with KuCoin was formed
Episode links:
- [Arwen website](https://www.arwen.io/)
- [Arwen's first white paper on eclipse attacks](https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/263.pdf)
- [Arwen's Trading Protocol whitepaper](https://arwen.io/whitepaper.pdf)
- [Announcement of Arwen's partnership with KuCoin](https://medium.com/arwensecure/arwen-partners-with-kucoin-to-offer-secure-non-custodial-trading-24af298d5dbd)
- [Arwen's Twitter](https://twitter.com/arwensecure)
- [Sharon Goldberg on Twitter](https://twitter.com/goldbe)
Sponsors:
- Cosmos: Join the most interoperable ecosystem of connected blockchains - http://cosmos.network/epicenter
This episode is hosted by Sunny Aggarwal & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: [epicenter.tv/305](https://epicenter.tv/305)
We’re pleased to be joined by the legendary cryptographer and computer scientist, David Chaum. From his early beginnings at Berkley, David pioneered many of the cryptographic techniques used in secure systems and cryptocurrencies today. Blind signatures, which are used in zero-knowledge proofs, and mix networks, used in Tor heavily rely on his work. At the dawn of the Internet, David founded DigiCash, what many believe to be a direct ancestor of Bitcoin. Today, David continues to pursue his mission to bring data privacy to all as his most recent project, Elixxir, aims to create a truly private messaging and payment app with a mass-market appeal.
Topics covered in this episode:
- David’s background as a Ph.D. student at Berkeley and his thesis entitled “Computer Systems Established, Maintained, and Trusted by Mutually Suspicious Groups”
- What drove him to work on cryptography and privacy systems
- His relationship to the early cypherpunk movement
- David’s contribution to cryptography primitives such as blind signatures, undeniable signatures, group signatures and mixers
- The story of DigiCash and how the company was founded
- The idea behind Cyberbucks and why the company ultimately went bankrupt
- Cryptocurrency adoption as a chicken-and-egg problem
- David’s personal views and practices with regards to online privacy
- His thoughts on the blockchain space today and his views on the future of the industry
- His current project, Elixxir, a messaging and payment app which protects users’ data and metadata
Episode links:
- [David Chaum’s website](https://chaum.com)
- [DigiCash](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/digicash.asp)
- [lists.cpunks.org Mailing Lists](https://lists.cpunks.org/mailman/listinfo)
- [DigiCash - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiCash)
- [Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments](https://www.chaum.com/publications/Chaum-blind-signatures.PDF)
- [DigiCash announcement article from 1994](https://www.chaum.com/ecash/articles/1994/05-27-94%20-%20World_s%20first%20electronic%20cash%20payment%20over%20computer%20networks.pdf)
- [Project Page: Multiparty Computation](https://www.chaum.com/spymasters/)
- [Security without Identification](https://www.chaum.com/publications/Security_Wthout_Identification.html)
- [Elixxir - Home](https://elixxir.io/)
- [Elixxir - Real Cryptography, Real Time: Precomputations in Elixxir](https://elixxir.io/blog/real-cryptography-real-time)
- [Elixxir - Why Mark Zuckerberg wants no privacy, why he wrote his letter,
and why it won’t help him](https://elixxir.io/blog/why-zuckerberg-wants-no-privacy)
- [Elixxir - Point of Departure](https://elixxir.io/blog/point-of-departure)
- [cMix white paper](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B1jv03qc8E1kx0kvGFx4blzwXrQepMyy/view)
Sponsors:
- Vaultoro: Trade gold to Bitcoin instantly and securely starting at just 1mg - http://vaultoro.com
- Trail of Bits: Trust the team at the forefront of blockchain security research - https://trailofbits.com
This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: [epicenter.tv/304](https://epicenter.tv/304)
We're joined by Ayo Akinyele, CEO of Bolt Labs. Bolt is building a new privacy-focused layer-2 payment channel network design. Initially designed by Matt Green and Ian Meyers, Bolt is being commercialized by Ayo and his team. Beginning with a Zcash integration, they have plans to implement on several crypto networks. We chat with Ayo about the technical design of BOLT channels, their privacy guarantees, how they complement designs like Lightning, and their synergies with the Zcash team.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/303
We’re joined by Eric Conner and Anthony Sassano, founders of EthHub. Started in January of 2019, EthHub’s goal is to provide a trusted, objective source of information for the Ethereum ecosystem. The platform is made up of an open-source documentation website, a weekly newsletter, and a podcast, “Into the Ether” hosted by Eric and Anthony. Both active and vocal members of the Ethereum community, they are known to embody what some consider to be Ethereum Maximalism.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/302
This week we're joined by Daniel Shin. He is the Co-Founder of Terra Money and previous CEO and Co-Founder of TMON, one of Korea's largest players e-commerce platforms. Today he talks about his success in that area and how that drove him to enter the cryptocurrency and blockchain space with this new project.
Daniel was lead to blockchain when looking for a solution to reduce transaction fees paid by online merchants. Not satisfied with just using an existing stable coin, he set about to make his own, which is how Terra was born.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/301
We’re joined by Erik Voorhees, Founder & CEO of Shapeshift. His third appearance on the podcast is timed nicely as July marked ShapeShift’s fifth anniversary. From its early days as the “Google Translate for cryptocurrencies”, it has grown into an organization of 75 people, and Erik talks about the learning curves he has endured on his journey. Our conversation also coincides with the launch of ShapeShift’s brand new V2 platform, which includes a self-custodial asset management dashboard, hardware wallet support, and many other new features. One notable change is that ShapeShift now requires users to create an account and perform KYC, something which very much pains Erik. We also discuss Bitcoin, Libra, and the future of money, topics which are always fascinating to approach from Erik’s Libertarian viewpoint.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/300
We're joined by Igor Barinov, the tech lead of the POA Network. The POA Network achieves a reduction in transaction costs by many orders of magnitude by having a set of trusted validators. All validators must be US public notaries, so their identities are known and legal recourse against them can be taken in the offchain world. We also talk about the xDai network, which enables Dai transactions on a POA chain: Dai are transferred into a smart contract on the mainnet and then become available to be transferred at much lower cost on the POA Network. Similarly, they can be transferred out of the xDai network and become available again on the mainchain. We talk about use cases, governance, and limitations.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/299
We're joined by Rune Christensen, CEO and Co-Founder of MakerDAO. We discuss the rise of Maker DAI as an algorithmically backed stable token and get into the weeds of the new version featuring multi collateral DAI as well as the ability to natively generate interest on DAI. We also cover the current governance model and how this can be attacked. The governance will undergo an overhall for the new version of Maker, introducing an Emergency Shutdown that can be triggered through MKR holders and promises to make the system more resilient. Lastly, we venture into what Rune hopes the future will bring for MakerDAO.
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This episode is hosted by Sunny Aggarwal & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/298
We’re joined by Ameen Soleimani, Co-founder and CEO of SpankChan. From his humble beginnings at ConsenSys, he went on to create SpankChain in 2017 at the height of the ICO boom. The project aims to create a better and safer environment for sex workers by removing the intermediaries who take significant commissions on their revenues. SpankChain’s initial product, an adult cam platform, allows users to pay performers in crypto with a native asset over sophisticated payment channels. More recently, Ameen headed a project called Moloch DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization with the goal to fund Ethereum 2.0 development. Moloch has but few simple functions: making proposals, voting on proposals, and exiting. This simple design, heavily inspired on “The DAO” of 2016 has attracted funding from Vitalik Buterin, Joe Lubin and other prominent community members.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/297
We’re joined by Jerry Brito, Executive Director of Coin Center. Having discovered Bitcoin in 2011, Jerry was among the first lawyers to talk about crypto in the U.S. capital. In 2014, he founded Coin Center, a leading research and advocacy center focussing on cryptocurrencies.
In this enlightening conversation, we talk to Jerry about his paper titled “The Case for Electronic Cash,” in which he articulates why private peer-to-peer payments are essential to an open society. We also discuss Libra and the possible regulatory challenges the proposed private cash system may face. Finally, Jerry explains the recent FinCEN guidance on cryptocurrencies, which broadly follows the recommendations of Coin Center.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/296
In this episode, we caught up with Robert Leshner, founder of the Compound protocol. Compound is a fascinating smart contract protocol, running atop Ethereum, that allows users to lend and borrow specific ERC-20 tokens with a duration-free interest model. The protocol acts as a central borrower and lender of user tokens and algorithmically prices the interest charged to borrowers and lenders. Compound is one of the first examples of a well-functioning lending market built using smart contracts.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/295
We're joined by Rob Dawson, Head of Product at PegaSys. PegaSys is the protocol engineering spoke of ConsenSys, and the team building Pantheon, a Java implementation of the Ethereum client. The Pantheon client was built from the ground up as both a mainnet, and consortium chain client. Written in Java with an Apache 2.0 license, it benefits from being easily accessible to enterprises, who predominantly use that language. The PegaSys team has built additional features into the Pantheon client like privacy, permissioning, and the ability to deploy chains on IBFT, a consensus algorithm better suited for consortium networks of up to 40 validators. Working closely with other protocol teams (Geth and Parity), and being a founding member of the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance, PegaSys is also working towards Ethereum 2.0.
Topics covered in this episode:
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/294
The complex and evolving regulatory landscape for cryptocurrencies has been a topic for many years. After a long period of waiting, the SEC started pursuing fraud causes in the last 1-2 years. But the recent lawsuit against Kik is the first time that the SEC goes after a large, non-fraud case.
We were joined by lawyer Stephen Palley to discuss the Kik case, the US regulatory landscape and recent announcement of the Libra cryptocurrency promoted by Facebook.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/293
This is part two of a two part bonus series. These sessions were recorded at the first Interchain Conversations conference which took place in Berlin on June 13th and 14th, 2019.
The firs part of this bonus episode features the validator panel moderated by Brian Fabian Crain, Co-founder of Chorus One. The panel included Florian Liss of Staking Facilities, Hendrik Hofstadt of Certus One, Aurel Iancu of Dokia Capital, and Jun Soon Kim of stake.fish. The conversation goes into the role of validators beyond staking, ways in which we can avoid too much centralization, and how validators will differentiate in a market which tends towards homogeneity.
The second part of this episode is a governance debate moderated by Sunny Aggarwal. The first topic is on plutocracy and features Jae Kwon and Rigel Rozanski. The second is about revokable governance and features Chris Goes and Jack Jampolin.
Subscribe to Epicenter for new episodes every week.
This is part one of a two-part bonus series. These sessions were recorded at the first Interchain Conversations conference which took place in Berlin on June 13th and 14th, 2019.
The first part of this episode is “Epicenter Live,” a live podcast recorded on stage at the event. It features hosts Meher Roy, Sunny Aggarwal, Brian Fabian Crain, and Sebastien Couture. In this conversation, we discuss the topic of blockchain interoperability. We look at how different projects address interoperability and seek to form a picture of how these projects might interact in a multi-blockchain future. We also discuss how these protocols address application comparability and speculate on how they will remain competitive.
The second segment is the opening Q&A between Jae Kwon and Sebastien Couture. Among other things, Sebastien spoke with Jae about the recent Cosmos launch, the Interchain Foundation, and the future of the Tendermint company.
Subscribe to Epicenter for new episodes every week.
The concept of a decentralized exchange has been a holy grail in the cryptocurrency space for many years. Many attempts have been made, but most decentralized exchanges suffered from central points of failure, poor user experience and little liquidity.
Launched during Ethereum's DevCon 2018, Uniswap is one of the first fully decentralized exchanges and managed to become the leading DEX very fast. We were joined by Uniswap Founder Hayden Adams to discuss Uniswap's unique model, the different participants in the protocol and the importance of decentralized exchanges for the blockchain space.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/292
We're joined by Tal Moran, Chief Scientist at Spacemesh. This new consensus protocol is designed to run on home desktop PCs, filling free space on users' hard drives to create a Proof of Space-Time. The goal of this new blockchain protocol is to solve the issues with Proof of Work and Proof of Stake, that is, energy inefficiency on the one hand, and possible centralized plutarchy of rich validators on the other.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/291
We’re joined by Dominic Tarr, a sailor, and the Founder of Secure Scuttlebutt. This curiously named project has a fascinating approach to creating a truly distributed social network. One might even say that Secure Scuttlebutt is “localized” as it gracefully degrades to Sneakernet, something few blockchain projects can claim. In actuality, the SSB protocol isn’t a blockchain in the traditional sense – each user’s feed acts as a sort of localized chain of posts, signed by their public key, and possibly encrypted for a friend's key to decrypt. When users meet, the system syncs their local databases using a gossip protocol and replicates the data. Encrypted data is transported from peer, to peer, to peer (or friends of friends) until it reaches its intended recipient. User may also optionally rely on public servers to sync data over the internet.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/290
We’re joined by Dan Robinson, a research partner at Paradigm, and the author the “Rainbow Network” paper. The paper describes an off-chain decentralized synthetics exchange which leverages payment channels. The Rainbow Network is based on the idea that “rainbows are basically just multicolored lightning,” borrowing from the concepts used in the Lightning Network. The protocol relies on trusted oracles and allows participants to trade any type of liquid asset off-chain. All that is necessary to complete a transaction is an on-chain payment channel collateralized by a single asset. Though it is still at the idea stage and has yet to be implemented, the Rainbow Network could have applications in prediction market and as a new type of decentralized exchange.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/289
A common meme in the cryptocurrency space is that it has the potential to help people in countries where only the rich and powerful access to global financial markets. But ten years after the Bitcoin white paper was released, just how many “unbanked” people has cryptocurrency helped? Some see crypto as a tool to empower vulnerable populations in places where hyperinflation and strict capital controls make day-to-day survival a nearly impossible challenge.
We’re joined by Jill Carlson. Previously at Chain and Tezos, Jill has been writing about the cryptocurrency industry for several years. In 2016 she published a paper titled “Cryptocurrency and Capital Controls” which observes the use of Bitcoin in Argentina. Recently, she co-founded the Open Money Initiative, a research organization which looks into how people use money in closed economies. Their initial focus is on Venezuela where years of economic downturn and strict currency controls have created a humanitarian crisis which has political repercussions well beyond the country’s borders.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/288
The Ethereum Foundation has played a crucial role in the evolution of the blockchain ecosystem. They pioneered the Swiss foundation structure and ran one of the first token sales. They played a key role in developing the second-most valuable blockchain network and still play a key role in funding research and steering the future of Ethereum.
At the same time, it has been frequently criticized for a lack of transparency, being too slow in funding development and poor financial risk management. Executive Director Aya Miyaguchi joined us to discuss her journey into the space, the role of the Ethereum Foundation and their plans for the future.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/287
We were joined by Mark S. Miller, Chief Scientist at Agoric. Mark is a computer scientist who has done ground-breaking work on many topics relevant to blockchain and smart contracts going back decades.
We discussed his visionary 1988 Agoric papers, which explored how markets could be applied to the world of software. We also covered how his view of smart contracts, which focused on secure bilateral agreements complements and converges with blockchain. Finally, we covered his new company Agoric and their conceptualization of higher order smart contracts.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/286
We're joined by Mike Pieciak, President of the NASAA. Not to be confused with the space agency, the North American Securities Administrators Association brings together state, provincial, and federal securities regulators in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. This relatively unknown organization helps align the financial regulation policies of over 50 agencies across North America and coordinates enforcement action in cross-border cases. In 2018, the NASAA launched “Operation Cryptosweep” in which over 200 ICOs and cryptocurrency-related investment products were investigated for potential investor fraud.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/285
We're joined by Griff Green, one of the founders at Giveth. The organization, which emerged out of the ashes of the DAO, aims to create a better model for charitable work. Operating as a Dapp, Giveth aims to bring new governance models in the nonprofit space. The goal is to create better incentives for donors and charity workers, in all types of social good projects.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/284
At the core of the Web 2.0 stack lies the REST API. It's the fiber which allows frontend applications to communicate with their backend counterparts, as well as the services on which they depend. But the API model is highly constrained and inflexible. The API is divorced from the data model, which creates a number of restrictions and inefficiencies. Most blockchain clients, including Geth, Parity and Bitcoin Core, use a JSON-RPC model which suffers from similar issues. Several Ethereum DApps maintain high-availability, centralized data indexes which sit between the client and the blockchain. Thought user experience is greatly improved, the practice means most of the ecosystem relies on centralized infrastructure.
We're joined by Yaniv Tal, Project Lead at The Graph. The project aims to create a scalable marketplace of robust and high-availability blockchain data indexes. Relying on the modern GraphQL data query language initially developed by Facebook, The Graph allows developers to make complex queries to a robust and high-availability data infrastructure. Launched as a hosted service earlier this year, The Graph plans to move to a decentralized model in the future.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/283
Human beings have a penchant for creating lists. We make lists for things like the top music artists at any given time, the best restaurants in the world, companies which people can trust, and the most wanted criminals. Lists take many forms. They can be maintained by a single authority, or curated by a crowd. But almost always, they remain in the custody of a central party. Token Curated Lists propose a model by which a) the content of lists are decentralized, and b) contributors are incentivized to curate their content according to social consensus.
We’re joined by Simon de la Rouviere, an independent researcher and blogger. Previously, Simon was one of the first employees at ConsenSys and founded Ujo Music. He also contributed to the ERC20 token specification and has written about blockchain and token economics since 2014. In recent months, Simon’s research has focused on Token Curated Registries (or TCRs), and the economics of curation markets.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture and Meher Roy . Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/282
The shipping container brought standardization to the way we move goods around the world. Similarly, TCP/IP packets normalized how information transits over computer networks. Today, blockchains remain siloed ecosystems and interoperability is practically non-existent. A new wave of third-generation blockchain protocols aims to change this. In this new paradigm, blockchains communicate natively and value moves seamlessly from one network to another. One of those projects is Cosmos.
We’re joined by Ethan Buchman and Sunny Aggarwal of Cosmos. With its recent mainnet launch, we discuss how the network is running and address potential issues relating to governance and centralization of power.
Disclaimers:
– Cosmos (All in Bits) is a sponsor of the podcast.
– Brian is a former employee of Tendermint (All in Bits) and founder of the Cosmos validator Chorus One.
– Sunny, is a regular host on Epicenter and founder of the Cosmos validator Sikka.
– All participants in this interview are Atom holders.
Topics covered in this episode:
Episode links:
Thank you to our sponsors for their support:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/281
Dogecoin was born from the association of two browser tabs: one was an article about the popularity of the doge meme, and the other, CoinMarketCap. The idea quickly gained traction on Twitter, and before long, a new cryptocurrency was born. Dogecoin gained adoption as a tipping currency, the community took part fundraising for charities and other causes, perhaps most notably sending the Jamaican bobsled team to the Sochi Winter Olympics.
We’re joined by Jackson Palmer, co-creator of Dogecoin. Though he has left the project, Jackson shares the story of how he created the most popular meme cryptocurrency as a joke.
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Thank you to our sponsors for their support:
This episode is hosted by Sébastien Couture and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/280
In the early days of Bitcoin, much of the community’s focus was around payment and getting merchants to adopt cryptocurrencies. Although the technology and narratives have evolved, some projects continue to embrace that original vision of peer-to-peer business, where merchants and their customers interact directly, and if they so wish, anonymously.
We’re joined by Brian Hoffman and Washington Sanchez of OpenBazaar. Since we last interviewed Brian in 2015, the project has grown to become a mature decentralized marketplace where people come together to buy and sell products and services anonymously with crypto. Its polished interface and reputation system gives users a similar experience to that of using eBay, but without fees or the risk of censorship.
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This episode is hosted by Sébastien Couture and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/279
Three years ago, a mysterious txt file signed by a pseudonymous Tom Elvis Jedusor was dropped in the Bitcoin-Wizards IRC channel outlining a proposal called Mimblewimble. It proposed a novel way of combining many ideas from Bitcoin research in order to create a new blockchain protocol that will be highly scalable and increase privacy, while still using the same cryptographic assumptions as Bitcoin. A few months later this project was picked up by another pseudonymous individual who started working on an implementation he called Grin. Grin slowly began to draw attention from the Bitcoin community and got a lot of traction.
We join Michael Cordner (Yeastplume) and Daniel Lehnberg, two of the core developers of the Grin blockchain. In this episode we discuss some topics around Grin’s cypherpunk origins, privacy and scalability features, no-premine fair start, and interesting monetary policy.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/278
Amaury Séchet is the lead developer of Bitcoin ABC, the largest client for the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. Amaury first got started with Bitcoin in 2010 and closely followed the Bitcoin block size debate as it progressed through the early years of Bitcoin. Predicting the eventual failure of SegWit2x, Amaury was part of the original team that helped coordinate the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, timing it with the activation of SegWit on the main Bitcoin blockchain. We discuss with Amaury the roadmap for Bitcoin Cash, especially with regards to their approach to scalability. We cover many of the novel features the Bitcoin Cash development teams are innovating on such as Canonical Transaction Ordering and Avalanche Pre-Consensus, as well as cover some of the more juicy drama that plagued the Bitcoin Cash community in late 2018, leading to split off of Bitcoin SV.
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Thank you to our sponsors for their support:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/277
Amaury Séchet is the lead developer of Bitcoin ABC, the largest client for the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. Amaury first got started with Bitcoin in 2010 and closely followed the Bitcoin block size debate as it progressed through the early years of Bitcoin. Predicting the eventual failure of SegWit2x, Amaury was part of the original team that helped coordinate the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, timing it with the activation of SegWit on the main Bitcoin blockchain. We discuss with Amaury the roadmap for Bitcoin Cash, especially with regards to their approach to scalability. We cover many of the novel features the Bitcoin Cash development teams are innovating on such as Canonical Transaction Ordering and Avalanche Pre-Consensus, as well as cover some of the more juicy drama that plagued the Bitcoin Cash community in late 2018, leading to split off of Bitcoin SV.
Topics covered in this episode:
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Thank you to our sponsors for their support:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/276
Artificial Intelligence is often misunderstood. And much like blockchain, those who fiercely stand by the technology believe it will change the world for the better. Others fear the negative repercussions it could bring it and would rather see it disappear.
We’re joined by Ben Goertzel. Ben’s interest in AI and robotics date back to his childhood and he has made these his life-long passion and work. He is the CEO of SingularityNET, a company building a marketplace for AIs which leverages blockchain. He is also Chief Scientist at Hanson Robotics who has brought us the now famous Sophia robot. When he’s not building blockchains and robots, he leads the OpenCog open-source AI framework and is Chair of Humanity +, an organization which focuses on technology and ethics.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/275
We’re joined by Alexey Akhunov, an independent Ethereum researcher. Alexey has been working on an ambitious project called TurboGeth. As the name implies, it is a version of Geth which features a number of speed and performance optimizations.
Alexey also leads the state rent working group of the Ethereum 1.x project. Ethereum 1.x came out of Devcon when core developers began to realize that the full migration to Serenity would likely take several years. The team hopes to bring progressive improvements to Ethereum in parallel to the development of Serenity.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/274
When the Lightning Network (LN) was conceived in 2015, it was quickly embraced by the Bitcoin community as the way to dramatically scale Bitcoin’s capacity. There was an expectation of LN being available quickly. Instead, development proceed more slowly in the background with different teams contributing to a standard specification. That spec is now almost ready and last year interest and early activity on the LN increased dramatically.
We were joined by Christian Decker, a core engineer at Blockstream, where he works on their LN client. We discussed the history and progression of the LN and what remains on the road to scaling Bitcoin.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/273
We’re joined by Jameson Lopp. Jameson is the CTO of Casa, a company providing key storage solutions. Previously, he was an early engineer at BitGo. However, to most people, he is perhaps known for his Twitter presence and his excellent writing. Over the years, Jameson has written extensively about Bitcoin development, cryptocurrencies, and personal operational security. A self-proclaimed “Professional Cypherpunk,” aligns with the ideas of libertarianism and volunteerism.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/272
The concept of DAOs has been captivating to many in the crypto space for years. When “The DAO” was created in 2016, in the few weeks of its existence and despite obvious flaws, it gather tremendous momentum and amassed 14% of the entire ether supply. Since then the technology has matured and Martin and Matan argue that the time for DAOs has finally arrived.
We were joined by DAOstack Founder Matan Field and Gnosis Founder Martin Köppelmann. We talked about the decentralized exchange protocol DutchX. We also talked about how the two projects together created the dxDAO, which will manage the DutchX protocol, but could go onto its own path. A path that could even lead to being the DAO for all of DeFi.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/271
Epicenter turned 5 years old this month – that’s a long time in the blockchain space! When the podcast began in January 2014, the entire ecosystem was made up of only Bitcoin and a handful of altcoins. Soon after, the Ethereum white paper was published which ushered in a new era of crypto assets and decentralized applications. Since then, we have released 270 episodes and interviewed some of the leading thinkers, entrepreneurs, and engineers in the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry. Needless to say, we have learned a lot about the blockchain industry, but also what it takes to run a successful podcast in this space.
This week, we look back on the early days of Epicenter and how the podcast has evolved over the years. We also answer your questions in our first ever AMA. Finally, we take stock of 2018 and the trends that marked this past year.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain, Friederike Ernst, Sébastien Couture and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/270
We’re joined by Joseph Lubin, Founder and CEO of ConsenSys. Joseph founded ConsenSys as an Ethereum development studio on the heels of the Ethereum crowd sale in 2014. The company has since grown to a distributed organization of over 1,000 people. Over 50 companies and projects have emerged from ConsenSys, including Metamask, uPort, Gnosis, and GitCoin, to name only a few. Today, the company continues to invest in growing the Ethereum ecosystem by funding projects, and through consulting services for companies and institutions.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/269
When token sales and ICOs took off in 2017, most projects chose to push ahead despite large regulatory risks. One of the few that went the other direction and put compliance first was CoinList. The platform made its debut by running the massive Filecoin token sales in which $205m was raised from accredited investors. CoinList also played a major role in popularizing the SAFT and creating tools to efficiently and legally raise in the US.
We were joined by CoinList President and Co-founder Andy Bromberg to discuss the history of CoinList, token sales, securities regulation and the potential of security tokens.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/268
Lending is one core pillar of the economy, enabling one person or company to be entrepreneurial with someone else’s capital. However, in the traditional banking system processes in lending are often opaque and the barrier to entry into this market is high. The emergence of easy to use Decentralized Finance is one of the hallmarks of 2018: To date, DeFi has brought us crypto-collateralized stable coins, decentralized exchanges, tokenized credit default swaps, trustless derivatives, and decentralized margin lending.
We’re joined Nadav Hollander, co-founder and president of Dharma. Dharma is a decentralized protocol for credit products which connects debtors with creditors through a transparent mechanism. The protocol itself is agnostic towards the collateral and terms used, however, the team recently introduced a crypto-collateralized margin lending application running on top of the Dharma protocol, Dharma Lever.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/267
Since the rise of digital currencies and cryptocurrencies, central banks are considering the role these new forms of money may play in our evolving digital economy. One of the ideas studied is the notion of a central bank digital currency. While people and companies can hold central bank liabilities in the form of cash, only licensed banks have access to digital cash accounts with central banks.
We’re joined by David Andolfatto, VP of Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. David was previously on the podcast to discuss his idea for Fedcoin, a central bank issued cryptocurrency. In a recent paper, he explores the impact central bank digital currencies may have on the monopolistic banking sector.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/266
While trustless interactions on Ethereum are native to the protocol, trustless interactions between the Ethereum blockchain and other blockchains are difficult to implement. Interoperability protocols heavily rely on atomic swaps, which typically come with a free option problem.
For this episode we’re joined by James Prestwich, CEO at Summa. Summa designs and implements cross-chain financial contracts and instruments such as swaps, options, futures, and auctions. Summa recently conducted a dutch auction spanning the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains: Ethereum NFTs were auctioned off trustlessly to bidders on the Bitcoin network. We also discuss Riemann, a framework for deploying transaction scripts to UTXO-based chains, as well as the advantages of the predictability of transactions in UTXO-based chains and how to bring some of those advantages to Ethereum smart contracts.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/265
We enter dozens of trust relationships ever time we interact with the Web. Browsers, ISPs, DNS providers, cloud hosting companies, all the way down to the handful of people who control certificate root keys; we rely on the integrity of these intermediaries to serve reliable, and accurate information. The concentration of power by any one of these actors threatens to compromise the very foundational principles of the Web. Decentralized technologies, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tor, and IPFS seek to reverse this trend.
We’re joined by Nick Sullivan, Chief Cryptographer at Cloudflare. Founded less than 10 years ago, the company offers content delivery services (CND), DNS, and DDoS protection to over 12 million websites. The company contributes to open source cryptography libraries, some of which are used by Etherum. They recently launched an IPFS gateway and features which allow users to have strong guarantees as to the integrity of the content.
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This episode is hosted by Sébastien Couture and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/264
The Ethereum vision has always been to create a world computer. But its scalability and performance limitations have meant that it has fallen far short of that vision. Yet, work on scaling Ethereum has exploded in breadth and complexity over the past years. From variants of PoS, to Plasma / Plasma Cash, sharding, EWASM, BLS signatures, everything has been on the table. While confusing on the surface, underneath a coherent vision for a new Ethereum that will scale near infinitely has emerged.
We were joined by Ethereum Researcher Justin Drake to discuss the Ethereum Serenity vision, its core components and the roadmap ahead. A particular focus was the beacon chain, the role of randomness and Verifiable Delay Functions.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/263
Most observers of the ecosystem will probably agree that 2015-2017 were the years of the enterprise blockchain. It was during that time that many startups catering to enterprise were founded and funded, including Monax and Stratumn (where Brian and Sebastien previously worked). For the permissioned blockchain camp, adoption would come in the form of enterprise use cases, arguing that public networks carried too much risk, and lacked needed features like privacy. While much of the hype has subsided, large companies in every sector are forming consortia and leveraging blockchain to provide better process traceability and transparency, and reduce their reliance on third parties.
We’re joined by Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director of Hyperledger. When Brian was last on the show, he had recently started his role at the Linux Foundation. Now, two years later, Hyperledger has gone from a nascent project to a mature ecosystem of technologies with hundreds of members. With dozens of networks in production, and backed by companies like IBM, Hyperleger is the most widely used blockchain technology for permissioned networks.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/262
The difficulties of compensating content creators for their work has been a driving force of the web for decades. It gave rise to advertising-driven tech giants like Google and Facebook and contributed to the decline of industries like music and publishing. Coil aims to change this and leverage blockchain and the Interledger Protocol to build a new business model for the web.
We were joined by Coil Founder and former Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas and Coil Co-Founder Ben Sharifian to discuss their ambitions to change how content is consumed and paid for.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/261
It’s that time of year again, Devcon time! Just as the conference was wrapping up, we sat down at the Prague Congress Center for a Devcon4 recap. Join Brian, Friederike, Sebastien, and a surprise guest host as we share our thoughts on the event, and how the Ethereum ecosystem has evolved since we last met in Cancun.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain, Friederike Ernst and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/260
From one of the main Ethereum clients, to Polkadot to Substrate; Parity has become exceptional at developing successful open-source blockchain projects. Their latest effort Substrate provides a framework to easily create custom blockchains. Building on cutting-edge technologies like Web Assembly, Substrate also offers automated on-chain upgrades.
We were joined by Gavin Wood, who was previously co-founder and CTO of Ethereum and founded Parity. We talked about the early Ethereum days, how Parity got started, Substrate, Polkadot and his views on on-chain governance.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/259
We’re joined by Monica Quaintance, Head of Engineering and Adoption at Kadena. While most companies providing enterprise solutions focus primarily on permissioned systems, Kadena is building both a public network protocol and private blockchain infrastructure. Their Chainweb protocol will soon launch as a public network and smart contract platform. The company claims their novel approach to proof of work offers enormous gains on transaction throughput, even at scale, while benefiting from the same security as Bitcoin. Alongside Chainwebs, Kadena is building a permissioned protocol more suited for enterprise applications in insurance and finance.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/258
Building open source software is a collaborative process which relies on good faith and willingness of volunteers. While most of the software we use daily relies heavily on open-source libraries, incentive models are broken. Repo maintainers are eager to see their projects evolve, but have little leverage to encourage developers to contribue. And projects contributors create enormous value by dedicating their time and expertise while getting little in return. Both open and closed-source projects utilize bountied to source engineering talent. Combined with blockchain technologies, there is a potential to create efficient, two-sided markets which align incentives for all participants.
We’re joined by Kevin Owocki, who is the Founder of Gitcoin. The Ethereum-based platform leverages the open source community to incentivize and monetize work, remunerating developers for pull requests made to projects. Gitcoin was itself built using Gitcoin and is today facilitating bug bounty payments for dozens of blockchain projects. At the time of writing, over 200 projects have used the platform to distribute over $340,000 in bounties to developers. As Gitcoin continues to grow, the goal is to expand its reach to the broader open-source ecosystem.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/257
CoinFund is one of the earliest crypto-funds to have taken shape, forming in early 2016. The fund is well known for running an active Community Slack, conducting great podcast interviews with cryptocurrency projects and an emphasis on building network nodes / services.
We are joined by Jake Brukhman, CEO, and Alexander Bulkin, Chief Alchemist, to discuss their latest thoughts on investing in the cryptocurrency space. We cover a wide variety of themes such as their opinions on the “fat protocol hypothesis,” thesis on value capture in the cryptocurrency space, their efforts to build network nodes; and their effort to build an open source token-less technology that allows entrepreneurs to launch their blockchains.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/256
The Tezos whitepaper, published in 2014, anticipated several areas that would become major issues for blockchain networks. Especially around governance and smart contract security, Tezos proposed original solutions. The project later went on to raise $232m in the biggest token sale at the time. Recently, the Tezos network launched as the first of a wave of innovative next-generation blockchain networks.
We were joined by Tezos co-founders Arthur and Kathleen Breitman to discuss the history of the project, how the network functions today and how it could develop going forward.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/255
Public blockchains produce enormous amounts of data. In theory, anyone can access the raw contents of transaction and blocks. In practice, however, querying blockchains can prove to be a daunting task.
The difficulty lies in the fact that blockchains are particular types of distributed databases and thus carry several limitations. Most, if not all, blockchains lack the most basic SQL querying capabilities supported by nearly every off-the-shelf database system.
Take Bitcoin as an example. Its API lacks even the most basic calls which would allow a user to query any address and receive the balance. In order to achieve this, block explorers and alike have developed sophisticated middleware infrastructure that parses the blockchain, normalizes the data, and stores it in a database, where it can be queried. In the best of cases, companies offer API calls for only a limited set of operations. Google hopes to change this by freeing blockchain datasets.
We’re joined by Allen Day, Science Advocate at Google’s Singapore office. Earlier this year, he and his team released the Bitcoin blockchain as a public dataset in Big Query, Google big data IaaS offering. In August, they added Ethereum to their list of freely available public datasets, which includes US census data, cannabis genomes, and the entirety of Reddit and Github. Anyone wishing to query the data can do so in SQL on the Big Query website or via an API. For instance, a relatively simple query would return the daily mean transaction fees since the Genesis Block in just a few seconds.
Coupled with Google’s AI and Machine Learning infrastructure and other open data sets, one can only imagine the potentially groundbreaking insights we could gain from this data.
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This episode is hosted by Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/254
The expectation has become widespread that blockchains will end up underpinning major societal infrastructures. The narrative in the blockchain space is that networks are decentralized and trustless and thus regulation should not apply to networks directly. Legal scholar Angela C. Walch has been questioning terms like decentralization and trustlessness and argues that blockchains shift the need for trust rather than remove it. Her controversial ideas include that key developers of open-source project should be treated as fiduciaries and held accountable for the consequences of their work.
Angela Walch is a professor of law at St Mary University School of Law and a Research Fellow at the Center for Blockchain at UCL. She is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School and has been doing academic work on legal issues surrounding public blockchains since 2013.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/253
Legendary scientist and cryptography pioneer Ralph Merkle joined us to discuss his recent paper on DAOs. Merkle examined how the voting mechanisms in today’s democracies are flawed and how a decentralized, transparent DAO making decisions using prediction markets could create more efficient democratic systems.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/252
The rise of populism and increasing inequality have led to widespread questioning of democracy and capitalism. Glen Weyl, a political economist and Principal Researcher at Microsoft, along with legal scholar Eric Posner, published a book called ‘Radical Markets’. Radical Markets explores how restructuring property rights and voting systems could lead to more efficient markets and a more just society. Glen joined us to discuss the book and why the blockchain space is a fertile testbed to explore these radical new ideas.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/251
Dispute resolution is the process by which contracting parties settle disagreements. Whether in the form of litigation, arbitration, or other means of mediation, every contract defines a dispute resolution mechanism and jurisdiction. It is the metaphorical Lady Justice, measuring the strength of each party’s arguments, and reaching a decision based on evidence.
Smart contracts are unique in this sense. Unlike traditional contracts, they are rigid and deterministic. Written in computer code, nuances in human language and vagueness of terms do not exist in this realm. There are no judges, no jury, just calculated execution.
The DOA hack and other similar events have prompted observers of the space to express the need for smart contract dispute resolution. Some have suggested “exit switches” that would allow for human intervention when edge cases appear. But could the arbitration process be integrated into the smart contract and on the blockchain?
We’re joined by, Federico Ast and Clement Lessage, respectively CEO and CTO of Kleros. This dispute resolution layer provides contracting parties with a fast and secure process for arbitration. The system is broken up into courts and sub-courts, each specializing in specific matters like e-commerce, insurance, and transport. In the event of a dispute, parties submit their case to Kleros, where a crowd of expert jurors analyses the evidence. When all votes are cast, the decision is enforced by the smart contract, which may unlock funds, or provide parties with additional time to fulfill the terms of the agreement. Clever incentive mechanisms reward jurors who vote with the crowd, making Kleros resistant to bribe attacks and collusion between jurors.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/250
We are joined by Ryan Zurrer, Principal and Venture partner, at Polychain capital. Polychain capital is a breakout crypto hedge fund with over $100 million in assets under management, and large investments in major crypto projects such as Dfinity, Polkadot, Filecoin and Vest. Ryan was the first person to join Olaf Carlson Wee in managing this fund. He built multiple companies in the wind energy industry prior to making a switch to the cryptocurrencies.
In this episode, we go behind the scenes of the Polychain success story. We get details on what crypto hedge funds are, how Polychain got started, reasons for its breakout success, its approach to blockchain investments and the current challenges of running a crypto hedge fund. Ryan also walks us through Polychain’s interest areas – Layer 1 blockchain protocols such as Filecoin, Dfinity and Polkadot; and financial derivative protocols. If you want to understand how some of the leading minds allocate capital at a large scale in the cryptocurrency industry, check out the episode.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/249
Until now, proposals to improve blockchain scalability have addressed the problem in one of two ways. One seeks to increase efficiency by optimizing the blockchain or improving the consensus algorithm. The other comes in the forms of layer-2 solutions such as payment channels or side chains.
However, none have addressed the core bottleneck to scalability: TCP/IP network limitations. Improving the speed at which blocks propagate through the network is the layer-0 problem few people consider when thinking about scaling.
Fundamentally, network bottlenecks are what prevent blockchains from increasing their transaction throughput. Raising the block size or reducing the time between blocks has devastating effects on usability as the probability of a fork increases. At a certain point, the blockchain simply breaks as forks occur faster than blocks can propagate to all validators.
Remarkably, the web figured out how to scale decades ago with the invention of Content Distributions Networks, or CDN. This is what enables platforms like YouTube to steam thousands of hours of video to hundreds of thousands of people every second. However, traditional centralized scaling solutions lack the privacy and censorship resistance necessary to serve the decentralized web.
We’re joined by Uri Klarman, CEO of bloXroute. Founded by a team of researchers and systems designers from Northwestern and Cornel University, including Emin Gün Sirer, bloXroute allows practically every blockchain network to “scale today.”
As a scalability infrastructure service, their Blockchain Distribution Network, or BDN, sits underneath blockchain networks. Anyone operating a miner can use the BDN without any changes to their consensus algorithm or protocol. By simply pointing their software to a bloXroute node, miners immediately benefit from propagation speeds orders of magnitude higher than the time which is currently required for blocks to be seen by all validators. This global network of servers is optimized to receive and stream massive amounts of transaction data to vast networks of nodes and miners.
While bloXroute relies on some level of centralization, it is provably neutral and cannot discriminate based on the contents, provenance or destination of a block. It also includes clever redundancy mechanisms which ensure availability in the event of an attack on the network.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/248
Since he started blogging as Two Bit Idiot in 2013, Ryan Selkis has been both industry insider and industry critic. Consistently calling out excesses and abuses, but also maintaining his sights on the long-term potential.
He recently founded Messari, a project that aims to bring more transparency and fairness to the industry. Messari has narrowed in on siloed, inaccurate and incomplete data as a key factor that allows insiders to profit at the expense of the public. We talked about the various ways in which Messari tackles that problem, ranging from a community-led effort to gather project data to the ambitious goal of a token-curated registry of stand-up projects.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/247
Privacy and scalability are arguably the most challenging issues blockchains face. Scalable privacy-preserving state machines are inherently difficult. While cryptocurrencies like Zcash have proven trustworthy for simple transactions, privacy in smart contract platforms is an entirely different animal.
We’re joined by Guy Zyskind, CEO of Enigma, a platform for scalable decentralized apps which preserves privacy. The Enigma network treats Ethereum smart contracts as “secret contracts” and can perform computations on encrypted data. Inputs are broken into pieces and distributed to network nodes which perform computations on a segment of the full data. Once returned to the Ethreum chain, data is reassembled and may be decrypted to reveal the result. Leveraging secure multi-party computation and Trusted Execution Environments (TEE), Enigma prevents a malicious actor from gaining access to the input data and the computation results.
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This episode is hosted by Sébastien Couture and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/246
Martin Becze is a researcher at Dfinity working on a next-generation “Blockchain Operating System” called Primea – a continuation of his work on the eWASM project from his time at the Ethereum Foundation. Primea is an actor based IPC layer intended for use with WebAssembly programs.
Martin first learned about Ethereum in 2014 and was immediately drawn into the possibilities opened by having a contracting virtual machines on a blockchain. While the EVM was impressive, Martin saw the possibility for greater usability and efficiency by using the new WebAssembly standards being created, and so led a team at the Ethereum Foundation in the creation of a new blockchain virtual machine, called eWASM. We learn about Martin’s experience on the eWASM project and how the limitations of backwards compatibility led him to begin writing a brand new execution environment from scratch, rethinking some of the core designs and mechanics of the EVM – this project became known as Primea. Martin explains many of the fundamental design shifts involved with the Primea platform, including his focus on using the actor-based model and object capabilities (and what these even mean!). He also lays out how the Primea platform fits into the larger design of the Dfinity blockchain.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/245
The 2016 Ethereum hard fork left us with two distinct Ethereum chains. While the main Ethereum chain dwarfs Ethereum Classic in terms of market cap, ETC has sustained its position as a significant actor in the broader blockchain ecosystem. ETC’s recent listing on Coinbase demonstrates its credibility as a significant industry player.
We’re joined by Anthony Lusardi, Director of the Ethereum Classic Cooperative, an organization who’s goal is to promote the development of the Ethereum Classic Network. Similarly to other industry organizations, The Cooperative invests in core development of the ETC blockchain, community building, marketing, and brand awareness.
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This episode is hosted by Sébastien Couture and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/244
One of the key scalability challenges with public cryptocurrency blockchains is that their size grows linearly with the number of transactions. Mature blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum contain >170GB and >1 TB of historical data respectively. New nodes joining these chains need to download this data and verify it in order to become a “full node”. The number of full nodes is a key measure of decentralization, and difficulty becoming a full node translates into future centralization.
In this episode, we are joined by the duo of Evan Shapiro and Izaak Meckler, CEO and CTO at O(1) Labs respectively. O(1) Labs is a pioneering company that uses zkSNARK technology in order to construct a cryptocurrency blockchain, called Coda, that solves the blockchain size scalability bottleneck. New nodes joining the Coda network will be able to trustlessly boot up in under a minute by verifying cryptographic proofs that attest to the validity of the current chain. This technology has great potential to enable decentralization, and for one blockchain to be a light client of another blockchain.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/243
When the Bitcoin Foundation fell apart and funding for Bitcoin core development was needed, the MIT founded the Digital Currency Initiative to step in. In the years since, the DCI has evolved into a vibrant center of cutting edge research on some of the most difficult challenges around blockchain technology.
DCI Director Neha Narula joined us to discuss the DCI’s position between academia and industry, their policy on conflicts of interest, and their most fascinating research topics.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/242
Before founding what is now one of the most successful companies in the cryptocurrency industry, Eric Larchevêque and his co-founder opened La Maison du Bitcoin, a Bitcoin education center and co-working space in the second district of Paris. It was through chance encounters in this space that Leger was born in the basement of 35 rue du Caire, where the company also operated a Bitcoin exchange desk and a handful of crypto miners.
Eric Larchevêque, CEO of Ledger, joins us again since his last appearance as a guest 200 episodes ago. We discuss the meteoric rise of Ledger from a ten-person team to now nearly 150 people across three continents. This fascinating discussion is a master class in product development, scaling at lightning speed, and staying true to your vision when everyone is pushing you to change course.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/241
While many cryptocurrency holders have thought about how to secure their assets, how to pass on cryptoassets in case of one’s death is rarely on people’s mind. Lawyer Pamela Morgan has been helping people and organizations build solutions to safely store their cryptoassets and has recently turned her attention to inheritance planning. Though we have often explored the legal issues surrounding blockchains and cryptocurrencies on Epicenter, never have we discussed the topic of inheritance.
We discussed her new book “Cryptoasset Inheritance Planning” and how people can design a simple plan to give heirs a high chance of recovering assets in less than an hour.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/240
In the past few years, we witnessed the development of multiple smart contract languages – Solidity, Viper, Michelson, Scilla etc. These languages need to enable developers to write correct, predictable behavior smart contract code. Each language development effort therefore ends up spending resources into building formal verification toolsets, compilers, debuggers and other developer tools.
In this episode, we are joined by Grigore Rosu, Professor of computer science at UIUC (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) for a deep dive into the K framework. The K framework is mathematic logic and language that enables language developers to formally define all programming languages; such as C, Solidity and JavaScript. Once a language is formally specified in the K framework, the framework automatically outputs a range of formal verification toolsets, compilers, debuggers and other developer tools for it. Updates to the language can be made directly in K. This technology has massive implications for smart contract programming language development, and formal verification efforts in the blockchain space.
We also cover his efforts to express the Ethereum virtual machine using the K framework, and to develop a new virtual machine technology, called IELE, specifically tailored to the blockchain space. Check out the episode to understand a game changing technology in the formal verification and smart contract safety space.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/239
With the rise of smart contract technology, we’ve become acutely aware of the need for smart contract code to accurately reflect the intentions of its author; and for the code to have certain (safe) behaviors in all circumstances. Creating the languages and software tools to enable ordinary developers to write safe contracts has become an intense research endeavor in the cryptocurrency space.
Scilla is a Turing incomplete intermediate level language; inspired from the paradigms of functional programming and formal verification; that makes it easy for smart contract developers to automatically prove statements about smart contract behavior. For example, Scilla could allow a future multi-signature smart contract author to mathematically prove that funds in that contract would always be retrievable by certain addresses (and never get stuck like the Parity incident). The ability to mathematically prove such safety properties of the smart contract has the potential to be an enabling invention prior to widescale use of this technology.
In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Amrit Kumar and Dr. Ilya Sergey to discuss Scilla, the smart contract language of the upcoming Zilliqa blockchain. In a previous episode, we’ve already covered the vision and technical approach of Zilliqa to solve the transaction scalability problem of permissionless blockchains. This episode focuses specifically on their smart contract language development efforts.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/238
As a society, we have organized as tribes, hierarchies, and markets to accomplish the most impressive of achievements. Human cooperation and collective organization are present at nearly every significant milestone in the history of human civilization. As we move towards an increasingly connected and automated society and economy, there will become a need for decentralized infrastructure which enables companies and markets to make fast decisions at scale.
We’re joined by Matan Field, CEO of DAOstack, a new platform that aims to become the operating system for collective intelligence. DAOstack is building a toolset to allow decentralized governance and building self-organizing collectives at scale.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/237
Aragon Founder Luis Cuende joined us to discuss their work on building tools for decentralized governance. We covered the origins of his deep drive, why this is a crucial fight for humanity and the tools that Aragon has built.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/236
The rise of Binance is one of the most astonishing stories in the blockchain space. Within less than a year of its launch, Binance has become the most popular crypto exchange trading over $2bn per day. In the past quarter, Binance made profits of $200m, likely the fastest company ever to reach this success.
Binance Founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao (“CZ”) joined us to discuss why he started Binance and the extraordinary organization they built. We discussed the role of the Binance token, how their strong commitment to values helped build a loyal community, and how he sees the organization evolve in the future.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/235
We are joined by Charles Hoskinson, who played an early role in developing Ethereum and BitShares, and is currently the CEO of IOHK. IOHK is an engineering company that undertakes cryptocurrency research, contributes development efforts to the Ethereum Classic ecosystem, and is spearheading the release of Cardano – a third generation blockchain protocol. IOHK has made the news recently after the publication of fundamental research papers on the Proofs of Proof of Work and the Ouroboros PoS algorithm, and its recruitment of highly rated academics.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/234
We are joined by Humayun Sheikh and Toby Simpson, founders of the Fetch.ai project. Humayun Sheikh is well known as the first investor in DeepMind, one of the leading AI companies in the world. This ambitious project seeks to create a self-learning blockchain network that fosters economic activity/combinations between off-chain AI agents. The fetch blockchain network will allow an AI agent, such as a delivery robot, to autonomously discover economic partners that would find its services and data valuable. Towards this goal, Fetch.ai claims to have found solutions to designing a useful proof of work system and building a scalable block chain.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/233
Ethereum Foundation researcher Karl Floersch joined us to discuss the main projects to upgrade Ethereum: Casper, Sharding and Plasma. Karl has been playing a key role in creating a new and simpler specification for Ethereum sidechains called Plasma Cash. We discussed the evolution of the Plasma project and what Ethereum’s evolution in the coming years could look like.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/232
With the advent of mature quantum technologies, many of the critical cryptographic protocols which secure the Internet, financial transactions and even military secrets may become susceptible to new attack vectors. For instance, while it may take a computer millions of years to decipher a public key’s corresponding private key, a sufficiently powerful quantum computer might achieve this in a reasonable amount of time. With this reality looming over us, many in the blockchain space worry that someone with access to a quantum computer might one day have the ability to steal their hard-earned crypto.
We’re joined by Ajay Prakash and Gavin Brennen, founders of the Qubit Protocol, a decentralized blockchain-enabled governance protocol that is meant to select and fund the best startups in the quantum world. As a co-author of the recent paper “Quantum attacks on Bitcoin, and how to protect against them,” Gavin walks us through the primary threats that quantum computing poses on Bitcoin. Among the major vulnerabilities are hashing functions and Elliptic Curve algorithms used for digital signatures, both fundamental components of Bitcoin, as well as many other blockchain protocols.
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This episode is hosted by Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/231
Dark pools have existed for as long as there have been financial markets. Over-the-counter, or OTC markets, are sometimes also referred to as ‘upstairs trading,’ evoking the era when firms and high-net-worth individuals would meet in the upper quarters of financial markets to make large trades privately. A dark pool is a private forum where one has access to high volumes of liquidity outside the boundaries of public markets. Orders and trades represented in dark pools typically remain confidential outside the purview of the general markets, thus preventing undesirable market impact.
We’re joined by Taiyang Zhang and Loong Wang, who are respectively CEO and CTO of Republic Protocol. Republic operates as a decentralized dark pool for cryptocurrency trading pairs such as Ether, ERC20 tokens, and Bitcoin. Buy and sell orders remain confidential in a hidden order book until matched without any of the parties having access to the underlying details. Trades are settled using cross-chain atomic swaps without the intervention of a trusted third party.
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This episode is hosted by Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/230
In just over ten years, geospatial tracking has gone from being a niche technology used by the military and outdoor enthusiasts to mass adoption, available to just about every connected device in existence. GPS and other location-tracking systems not only allows us to find our way and share our location but is critical to businesses and governments. However, while GPS has become a standard thanks to its accuracy and availability, decentralized applications can’t rely on its location data as it can be easily spoofed and lacks reliability.
We’re joined by Ryan John King, CEO of FOAM, a blockchain protocol which aims to offer secure location services independent of external centralized sources such as GPS. FOAM introduces a novel crypto-spacial coordinate system that is better suited to blockchains than standard addresses or latitude and longitude coordinates. It also provides a Proof of Location Protocol, which leverages long-range low-power radio networks, and incentive mechanisms, allowing network participants to arrive at consensus on whether an event or agent is verifiably at a particular point in time and space.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/229
The healthcare industry is paradoxical. On the one hand, treatment technologies represent some of the most advanced science known to humankind, while some administrative tasks are still performed using paper and fax machine. Studies have shown that the administrative costs of healthcare can represent up to one-third of the total cost of care. Also, as diagnosis, treatment, and care, becomes increasingly data-driven and patient-specific, the industry needs to adopt more secure and robust technologies to manage patient data and communications between the patient and the different participants in the healthcare supply chain.
We are joined by John Bass and Corey Todaro, who are respectively CEO and CPO of Hashed Health, an innovation firm focused on accelerating the meaningful development of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies for the industry. Hashed Health works to build solutions which leverage blockchain to solve some of the most important challenges facing this sector.
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This episode is hosted by Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/228
Over the past year, as cryptocurrencies and ICOs started to go mainstream, we have seen a huge surge in regulatory activities. In the US, many different regulatory bodies including SEC, CFTC and FinCEN stepped forward to regulate crypto projects in different ways. Seemingly contradictory statements have added to confusion and fear of a broad crackdown looming.
We were joined by CoinCenter Director of Research Peter Van Valkenburgh to shed clarity on recent developments and understand where things are heading.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/227
According to the World Bank, universal financial access is vital to reducing poverty, and lack of access to credit plays a significant role in widening inequalities between developed and developing nations.
For producers at the end of the supply chain, and who typically have little access to capital, waiting for customers to pay for their products puts them at high financial risk and threatens their livelihood. What if there was a way to bring more liquidity to global supply chains, by allowing anyone to create liquidity from their existing assets.
We’re joined by Bob Summerwill, Community Ambassador at Sweetbridge, an ambitious project that aims to change the way global business operates at a fundamental level. While supply chains account for about two-thirds of the World’s GDP, value is trapped in non-liquid assets sitting in warehouses, on store shelves, or in the form of outstanding invoices. Sweetbridge acts as a sort of OSI model for global business. In the Sweetbridge economy, working capital is freed up by enabling individuals and organizations to borrow from themselves interest-free.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/226
We were joined by Anson Zeall, who is one of the leaders of Singapore’s blockchain and FinTech community. We discussed how the Singapore ecosystem evolved, why it became a popular place to locate cryptocurrency project, its current regulatory framework. We also dove into some of the projects he is currently involved in including one involving tokenizing cows!
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/225
We’re joined by Jeff Garzik, who was among the very first developers to work with Satoshi in the early days of Bitcoin. Later, he was a core developer at Bitpay and even tried to put a Bitcoin node on a satellite in space. Today, he is co-founder at Bloq, a company providing enterprise-grade blockchain infrastructure. Bloq recently announced a new project called Metronome that challenges some of the design and governance principles of many public blockchain networks.
Metronome is cryptocurrency that sits on top of existing blockchains and aims to allow tokens to easily move from one network to the other. A series of standard blockchain contracts allow for daily descending price auctions to occur automatically, and for users to buy and sell the tokens using a Bancor-like system with built-in liquidity.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/224
That decentralized networks represent a massive investment opportunity is no longer a controversial view. In the last year alone, over 200 funds dedicated to investing in cryptoassets have been created.
But the principles and frameworks to understand this new world are still in its infancy. One fund at the forefront of advancing this understanding has been Multicoin Capital. Their Founders Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain joined us to discuss some of the concepts they use to invest in decentralized networks.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/223
Decentralized exchanges have been a holy grail in the cryptocurrency space, since at least the MtGox hack. They promise to derisk the act of exchanging cryptocurrency by leaving custody of funds in the hands of the users. And they should be resistant to regulatory pressure, creating a permissionless way to trade cryptocurrencies.
Among decentralized exchange projects, 0x has gained by far the most traction in the short time since launching. Co-founders Will and Amir joined us to discuss the 0x protocol, the emerging 0x economy and the vibrant community they’ve built.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/222
We’re joined by Greg Meredith and Nash Foster of the RChain Cooperative. A fundamentally new kind of blockchain platform, RChain is rooted in a formal model of concurrent and decentralized computation. Powered by the Rho Virtual Machine, and secured by Casper proof-of-stake, RCain is partitioned, or shareded by default, forming a network of coordinated and parallel blockchains. The project, which is formed as a coop, leverages correct-by-construction software development to produce a concurrent, compositional, and massively scalable blockchain.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/221
Zeppelin Co-Founder and CTO Manuel Araoz joined us to discuss his journey from building one of the first non-financial Bitcoin applications in 2012 to improving development and security practices for Ethereum smart contracts. We discussed the OpenZeppelin framework, a library of audited smart contracts as well as their new project zeppelin_os. Through on-chain, well-vetted and upgradeable smart contracts zeppelin_os aims to make developing Ethereum applications both easier and more secure.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/220
Hashgraph is a new consensus algorithm that radically differs from proof-of-work as well as proof-of-stake consensus algorithms. While work on Hashgraph begun in 2012, it’s design is radically different from today’s blockchain architectures. The Hashgraph team claims that it has found an optimal consensus algorithm design that will be impossible to significantly improve upon.
We were joined by Mance Harmon, who is CEO of the Swirlds, the company developing Hashgraph. Our conversation covered the origin story of hashgraph, how it compares to existing consensus algorithms and how Hashgraph works.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/219
Over the past year, cryptoassets have exploded in popularity. From a mere $18bn at the start of 2017, the aggregate market cap of all cryptoassets recently reached $820bn as interest in Bitcoin and its cousins went mainstream. Jack Tatar and Chris Burniske joined us to discuss their new book ‘Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor’s Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond’. It is one of the first systematic views on cryptoassets from a mainstream investor’s perspective.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/218
A significant part of the modern digital economy, is underpinned by machine learning models that are trained to perform tasks such as facial recognition, content curation, health diagnostics etc. Data to train machine learning models is the essential commodity of this century – a sentiment captured by epithets such as “”Data is the new oil””. Today’s dominant AI paradigm has companies focus their efforts on gathering data from their users in order to train models and monetise usage of the model. This model has many consequences such as loss of privacy for the user, consolidation of data in a handful of large companies, low access to data for startups and a fundamental impossibility of collecting sensitive data such as markers for depression.
Our guest, Andrew Trask, is building OpenMined – a platform that merges cryptographic techniques such as homomorphic encryption and multi-party computation and blockchain technology to create the ability to train ML models with private user data. OpenMined will allow AI companies of the future to develop models, have them trained on user data without compromising user privacy, and incentivise users to train their model. We walk through the OpenMined vision and its potential impact on AI business models and AI safety
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/217
Blockchain technologies are changing the way we think about data archival and storage. For instance, most database systems can only capture the current state of a data set. This means we must rely on secondary backup systems to ensure historical data can remain accessible, a stark contrast from what the most basic of blockchains provide out of the box. Database systems that offer immutability and historical context for data would be greatly beneficial for companies as it would make internal and external audits much less costly and time-intensive.
We’re delighted to bring you an interview with Flip Filipowski and Brian Platz. Flip is a veteran entrepreneur whose career spans 50 years, having worked for and founded some of the world’s largest software companies of the 80’s and 90’s. He is also the CEO of SilkRoad Equity and a Founding Partner of Tally Capital. Brian’s background includes having founded A List Appart in 1994, which is among the oldest and most influential web development blogs, and SilkRoad Technologies.
Flip and Brian join us to talk about their new company, Fluree. Their product, FlureeDB, is a scalable graph database which provides the benefits of blockchain technologies, such as immutability, replayability and fault tolerance. Currently, in development, the goal for FlureeDB is to support various consensus rules based on the network configuration: private systems, federated (or consortium) clusters, and fully decentralized public networks.
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This episode is hosted by Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/216
The prospect of providing digital cross-border payments for the world’s unbanked and underbanked population has always been one of the key use cases for Bitcoin. Cryptocurrencies can be seen as a way for people in developing countries to participate in the global financial market by allowing easy cross-border payments, cheap remittance transactions, and simplified lending options.
We’re pleased to be joined by Elizabeth Rossiello, CEO and Founder of BitPesa. BitPesa provides companies in frontier markets with the financial infrastructure to facilitate commerce and payments, where traditional financial markets are known to be fractured and expensive. As an early Bitcoin company founded in 2013, BitPesa is now present in a handful of African countries and provides essential financial services to businesses, allowing them to send and collect payments, and perform quick and affordable Forex trades.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/215
We’re joined by Christopher Fabian, Co-founder of Unicef’s Innovation Unit. We discuss how the global non-profit institution leverages innovative technology to solve real-world problems in humanitarian work. We explore the different applications of blockchain in the UN and Unicef, as well as the challenges we can anticipate when deploying these technologies in the developing world. Shaun Conway, Founder of Ixo Foundation, also joins the discussion as a startup working Unicef and talks about the value of a global reputation network for humanitarian projects.
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This episode is hosted by Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/214
In the blockchain world, few people are as brave as Tim Swanson when it comes to busting hype. Tim’s unbiased, honest, and sometimes controversial opinions provide a refreshingly realistic view of blockchain adoption and applications of this technology by people and businesses. Cutting through the hype, the over-sold press releases ad the blind optimism of a completely decentralized economy, Tim’s insights provide a sobering look at the state of the blockchain.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/213
We were joined by Founder Adam Perlow and Developer Asher Manning of Zen, a public blockchain project focused on building a decentralized financial system. The core premise of Zen is that none of the public blockchain networks are focused on financial asset. Zen is aiming to fill that gap through a Bitcoin-like UTXO architecture that supports multiple asset and smart contracts to enforce complex ownership rules.
We talked through their original design choices, their use of formal verification, connection to Bitcoin and vision for a fully decentralized financial system.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/212
Neufund CEO Zoe Adamovicz joined us to discuss how Neufund is creating a platform to allow companies to sell tokens backed by actual company equity.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/211
Chaincode Labs Founder Alex Morcos joined us to discuss his journey, the role of the company in Bitcoin’s development and the views that drive his work.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/210
Scaling public blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum is a long standing technical challenge. In this episode, we cover Zilliqa which has pioneered a design to scale public blockchain throughput with the number of nodes by sharding the blockchain. Sharding has been hitherto proposed as a scaling technique by Ethereum. Zilliqa is one of the first projects to propose a concrete design with an operational testnet processing a couple thousand transactions per second across several shards.
Our guests, Xinshu Dong (CEO) and Amrit Kumar (Crypto Lead), walk us through the objectives, protocol design and fundraising structure of this innovative project. We also briefly cover Zilliqa’s novel approach to designing a smart contract language and execution environment.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/209
For the very first time, all three Epicenter hosts found themselves in the same location. After attending Ethereum’s DevCon 3 in Cancun, we were at a Cosmos Retreat and discussed the conference, retreat, state of the Ethereum ecosystem and recent Parity hack.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain, Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/208
We are joined by Micah Winkelspecht, CEO and Founder of Gem. What started as a Bitcoin API in 2014 has evolved into a leading provider of blockchain solutions for enterprise. Gem addresses the problem of digital data silos and the complexities they introduce when companies and individuals collaborate and share information. Their product, GemOS, provides a full-stack blockchain middleware platform which allows companies to build applications on top of blockchains protocols like Ethereum or Hyperledger Fabric.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/207
Energy markets form a complex ecosystem of actors. Wholesale energy producers create energy through various means, grid operators transport electricity over long distances and deliver it to homes and businesses, who buy it from local utility companies. The utilities act as resellers in this scheme and take on much of the financial risk associated with selling a commodity which is consumed long before payment settlement from consumers. However, utilities have high operation and marketing costs and charge a high markup on the electricity they buy from wholesalers.
Karl Kreder, Co-founder of Grid+, a Consensys project, joins us to talk about how blockchain technology can help disintermediate utilities and allow consumers buy electricity directly from producers. The Grid+ Agent is a hardware device which sits in your home, is connected to your energy meter and can interact with the power grid. The Agent has built-in logic allowing it to respond to your energy needs and predict usage. It is also equipped with a Trusted Execution Environment and a wallet which keeps private keys secure and can make near real-time payments to the network.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/206
Galen Wolfe-Pauly, CEO of Tlon, the company behind Urbit, joined us to discuss one of the most radical and curious projects to come on the podcast. In development for 15 years already, Urbit aims to unravel the cloud computing paradigm that led to the creation of internet monopolies like Google and Facebook. Instead, in Urbit, each person has a personal server, a kind of digital sovereign entity, where applications are run, which leaves control and data in the hands of users.
Galen joined us to discuss what the philosophy and ideas driving Urbit, how a radically different internet could look like and what our path is to get there.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/205
As the ICO boom continues to drive funding and interest in cryptocurrencies, mainstream consumer applications are increasingly looking towards tokenization. One of these was social network Pepo, founded by veteran entrepreneur and previous founder of fab.com Jason Goldberg. Faced with the difficulties of integrating blockchain, they decided to start Simple Token – a company focused on building easy solutions for mainstream applications to use blockchain.
Simple Token CEO Jason Goldberg and Chief Technology Strategist joined us to discuss the case for branded token, Simple Tokens architecture and the balance between easy user experience and decentralization.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/204
Nasdaq is one of the largest and most well known financial institutions in the World. As the second-largest stock market by market capitalization, Nasdaq is also one of the leading software companies in capital markets, providing its Nasdaq Financial Framework to exchanges all around the globe.
Fredrik Voss, VP of Blockchain Innovation at Nasdaq, joins us to discuss how Nasdaq is leveraging blockchain technologies to propel itself into the future. Having invested in Chain and Stratumn, Nasdaq is taking a very hands-on approach, building products which it integrates into the various software solutions they sell.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/203
For many years, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies were regarded as little more than a nerdy curiosity by the financial world. But with the rise of Bitcoin and Ethereum, the process of cryptocurrencies becoming a recognized asset class has begun.
One person at the forefront of this transformation is Ari Paul. Previously a portfolio manager at the University of Chicago’s $8 billion endowment, he recently left to start the cryptocurrency hedge fund BlockTower Capital. He joined us for an insightful conversation about one of the biggest trends in the industry.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/202
Enterprise consortium blockchains have gained a lot of interest in recent months. And although we can see many applications for this particular type of network deployment, many questions remain to be answered before these systems can move to production. Issues related to scaling, network deployment, access controls and key management remain open at this point. With its deep roots in the enterprise, Microsoft hopes to have answers to these questions.
Matt Kerner, Partner GM for Blockchains at Azure, joins us to discuss Coco Framework. Coco is an open-source system which promises to enable high scalability and offer confidentiality for enterprise blockchain consortiums. This novel framework leverages Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) to deliver blockchain networks with throughput comparable to database speeds.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/201
In the past year, the first killer application of blockchain technology has emerged: venture funding. As blockchain-facilitated crowdfunding is disrupting venture capital at blistering speed, we are joined by Ciaran O’Leary, Founder and General Partner at BlueYard. BlueYard stands at the intersection of this transition. Structured as a traditional VC fund, its thesis focuses fully on the decentralized economy and it invests in tokens too. Ciaran joined us to discusses what blockchain means for VCs and its implications for BlueYard.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/200
Scalability and interoperability are two of the main issues facing blockchain protocols today. In a future in which entire industries and economies rely on distributed technologies, it is unclear how blockchain networks will support massive amounts of data, and exchange transactions in a trusted way.
Peter Czaban, co-founder of Polkadot, joins us as we dive deep into the Polkadot Network. Polkadot is a heterogeneous multi-chain network, consisting of many connected chains (or parachains), all of which have their own set of features and characteristics. Transactions flow across chains, while Polkadot ensures the global security and consensus of the network, forming an ‘Internet of Blockchain networks’. Scalability is achieved through the parallel processing of transactions on the different parachains.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/199
Nick Morgan, a former attorney at the SEC, joined us to discuss their recent report on the DAO and what it means for the ICO boom.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/198
After Bitshares and Steemit, Dan Larimer’s latest project EOS has also gathered lots of attention. Their record-setting crowdsale has already raised $300m and is continuing for another year. Dan joined us to discuss his journey in the industry, what connects the different projects, how EOS works and how the EOS crowdsale works.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/197
Prior to hosting his ground breaking podcasts Beyond Bitcoin and The Ether Review, Arthur Falls had left his home country of New Zealand to fish lobster off the coast of Maine. Like many people in the blockchain space, his unlikely journey into the world of decentralized technologies is a fascinating one, and he shares it with us in this episode.
Arthur recently traveled to over a dozen locations around the World, conducting interviews for an upcoming documentary. He shares what he learned and his favorite experiences from this trip.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/196
We’re joined by Loi Luu, Co-founder of KyberNetwork. This new decentralized exchange protocol, built on Ethereum, aims to match buyers with reserve operators, who create liquidity for crypto-asset pairs. Trades occur instantaneously and without the need for a trusted third party exchange operator.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/195
Bancor is a simple, but hard-to-understand protocol that enables price discovery and liquidity even for assets that aren’t actively traded. Co-Founder Eyal Hertzog joined us to explain how the Bancor protocol works and why they think it will play a key role in enabling a massive wave of small, but interconnected user-generated currencies. We dissected the workings of the protocol, its radical implications as well as the takeaways from their record-shattering, but controversial crowdsale.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/194
Dave Collins and Jake Yocom-Piatt join us to talk about Decred, a cryptocurrency which introduces an innovative system of community-based governance into its blockchain. Decred implements a hybrid Proof of Work and Proof of Stake system in which miners validate transactions, while users can vote on new features and upgrades to the protocol. This clever approach enables efficient blockchain governance, which has demonstrated to be successful in a recent protocol upgrade on the live network.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/193
Hebrew University academics Aviv Zohar and Yonatan Sompolinski joined us to discuss their research at the forefront of blockchain technology. We talked about their early proposals for scaling Bitcoin using the GHOST protocol, which later inspired Ethereum. And then we discussed SPECTRE and a new type of network based on directed acrylic graphs (DAG). DAGs abandon the blockchain data structure to allow constant generation of blocks that later get merged achieving block times of seconds and throughput many orders of magnitudes above current blockchain network.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/192
Numerai Founder Richard Craib joined us to discuss his radical project to build a hedge fund with network effects. Numerai manages its portfolio by giving its data in encrypted form to data scientists who compete to create the best predictions and get paid with cryptocurrencies. Numerai expects to radically alter the structure of the hedge fund and asset management industry.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/191
Shapeshift CEO Erik Voorhees joined us to discuss his journey in the industry, the evolution of the decentralized exchange Shapeshift and their latest project Prism. We spent most time diving into the mechanics and enormous potential of Prism. Prism allows users to create a portfolio of digital assets that is purely managed on the Ethereum blockchain and illustrates how blockchain-based financial products can be built.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/190
After years of what has seemed like an endless debate, bitcoin may be at a crucial turning point in its relatively short lifetime. The question network scalability has divided the community into several factions which are seemingly irreconcilable. However, in just a few weeks, the future of bitcoin may be decided as miners and users throw their support behind one of many proposals to propel the bitcoin network into a new era.
Bitcoin Developer and Principal Architect at Paxos, Jimmy Song, joins us to discuss the different scalability proposals for which miners are currently signaling their support. Among others, Segregated Witness (BIP 141), Emergent Consensus (Bitcoin Unlimited) and SegWit2x (The New York Agreement), are gaining significant traction among miners. Will one of these proposals gain majority support, allowing for the network to upgrade with relative ease, or will we enter a situation where one proposal is backed by a strong minority of users, potentially forking the network into two?
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/189
Token sales, often called Initial Coin Offerings (ICO), are exploding in popularity. Seemingly each week a new record is hit with huge sums being raised by alpha-stage projects in almost no time. William Mougayar, an investor, author and blogger, who has been at the forefront of the token sale movement joined us to unpack the most dynamic trend in the blockchain ecosystem. We cover the great promise of token sales in disrupting venture capital and changing how startups are build and grown. We also address the apparent irrationality of valuations and what distinguishes a responsible from a reckless token sale.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/188
With most of the world’s computing power concentrated in Internet companies’ data centers, the Internet has become a very centralized place. The Golem project aims to build the sharing economy of computing power. This “global, open sourced, decentralized supercomputer” will function thanks to the combined power of a massive network of machines, from personal laptops to whole data centers.
We’re joined by Julian Zawistowski and Alex Leverington, CEO and P2P engineer at Golem. We discuss how Golem hopes to create a more balanced distribution of computing power for the Internet.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/187
Our regulatory expert Siân Jones joined us to discuss her work on a regulatory framework for distributed ledger technology (DLT) for Gibraltar. We discuss how the framework differs from other efforts and aims to attract rather than curtail blockchain businesses. We also covered why the rapid changes require the flexibility of a principle-based approach to regulation. Finally, we discussed current trends around ICOs and how they could be impacted by regulation.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/186
The saying goes: if you’re not paying for it, it’s likely that you’re the product. And with the rise of targeted ads, user behavior tracking, and alike, more and more users are turning to ad blocking software to protect their privacy and improve their browsing experience. In the last 25 years, the content monetization and Internet advertising industries have evolved to become complex ecosystems with multiple intermediating layers between users, publishers, and advertisers. This has created a situation where user’s rights are constantly violated and where little accountability exists.
We’re joined by Brendan Eich, Founder, and CEO of Brave. As an early Internet pioneer, Brendan created Javascript while working at Netscape in the mid 90’s, and helped found the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation, where he served as CEO for several years. Brave is a new desktop and mobile browser which blocks ads and tracking by default. This has the advantage of drastically improves page load times while protecting users’ privacy. But Brave is much more than just a browser. Their team will launch the Basic Attention Token, which will serve as the currency of attention marketplaces between publishers, advertisers, and users. With the ambition to turn the Internet advertising industry on its head, this new attention economy marketplace will eliminate the need for unneeded intermediaries, provide publishers with new content monetization models and remunerate users when they chose to share their data with advertisers.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/185
Data is the new oil, and those who control massive amounts of it have a major competitive advantage. That advantage becomes exponential when that data is used to teach artificial intelligence. Companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon have a far greater probability of building strong AI than smaller actors simply by the sheer amount of user data and metadata they possess. Let’s now envision an alternate reality where big data lives on public infrastructure and is accessible to anyone who wishes to use it for the purpose of teaching AI. Big data as a public resource could have the potential to enable vast amounts of innovation at the edges, far greater than that of a small set of incumbents building large centralized AI systems.
We’re joined by Trent McConaghy, who is the CTO and Co-founder of BigchainDB and Ascribe. Trent brings along a special surprise guest, Fred Ehrsam, former Co-founder at Coinbase. For the first half of the show, we have a fascinating discussion with Trent and Fred about the intersection of AI and blockchain technologies, and the implications of publicly available data sets on innovation in AI. For the second half of the show, we talk with Trent about the public implementation of BigchainDB, the Interplanetary Database (IPDB), and the applications for a public big data storage network accessible to all of humanity.
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This episode is hosted by Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/184
Naming systems are an important component of any networked information system. It’s difficult to imagine how the Internet could have been adopted by the masses had it not been for the Domain Name System, which translates machine-readable IP addresses into human-readable domain names. Blockchains, with their long and complex address formats, suffer from a similar problem. One might think a solution would be to apply the same naming system architecture we have for the public Internet to public blockchains. But DNS, in the eyes of many, is a largely flawed system. Centrally controlled by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), Internet domain names are vulnerable to censorship and barriers to entry are kept artificially high – registering a new Top Level Domain (ex: .epicenter) costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.
We’re joined by Alex Van de Sande and Nick Johnson to discuss their approach to creating an open, secure and decentralized naming system for the Ethereum Network. The Ethereum Naming System (ENS) allows users to register .eth domain names, which can be used in supporting Ethereum wallets and clients. Names are reserved by placing a deposit in a smart contract and can be mapped to any Ethereum addresses. So rather than sending funds to 0x8cd…0935, one would simply need to type a memorable name like epicenter.eth into their wallet. Backed by the Ethereum Foundation, ENS will likely become the defacto standard for name registration in Ethereum.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/183
Coin Center is a non-profit in Washington DC that focuses on research and advocacy issues facing public blockchain networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Their aim is to protect users and foster innovation through achieving sound policies and regulations.
Director of Research Peter Van Valkenburgh joined us to discuss the work of the center and the most pressing regulatory issues facing the industry today.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/182
The road to mainstream adoption of blockchain technologies is a long one. Although the user experience of wallets has greatly improved since the dark days of command-line only interfaces, decentralized applications continue to struggle with onboarding non-technical users.
Jarrad Hope and Carl Bennetts, join us to discuss Status, a mobile Ethereum client which aims to turn the standard wallet experience on its head. At its core, Status is a mobile instant messenger client that leverages the Whisper protocol for secure peer-to-peer communication. Through its familiar messaging interface and elegant design, users can chat and send Ether directly in the app. As the first implementation of Ethereum’s Light Client Protocol, users may also use decentralized applications such as uPort, Gnosis and Aragon on their mobile phones. Built as an open source project, Status’ developer platform also allows developers to easily port their Dapps to the app.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/181
Anyone who has ever started a company knows just how tedious that process that can be. Whether it’s establishing a shareholder’s agreement, defining the company’s constitutional structure, raising funds, or transferring shares, corporate governance procedures remain largely paper-based, requiring validation from multiple stakeholders, and their lawyers. Blockchain technologies, and specifically smart contracts, provide the rails upon which these processes can be digitized and streamlined, reducing operational costs, eliminating errors and automating menial tasks.
Manu Thanabalan, CTO of Otonomos, joins us to discuss how his company is leveraging smart contracts to accelerate incorporation and automate corporate governance. Otonomos provides the tools and services which allow for anyone to start a company in any of the jurisdictions they support. Using their platform, founders are able to define board members and issue shares, while captables are kept up-to-date in real-time. Day-to-day governance mechanisms and standard procedures such as voting and share transfers are automated through a smart contact, which complies with local jurisdictional regulation.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/180
Years into the great Bitcoin scaling debate no solution is in reach. Neither bigger blocks nor Segregated Witness have anywhere near consensus support. With the conflict escalating, a Bitcoin fork has become a real possibility.
Electrum Developer Thomas Voegtlin joined us to discuss the state of the Bitcoin scaling debate. We discussed Bitcoin Unlimited, ASICBoost, SegWit activation without miner support and how a Bitcoin fork could play out. Possible outcomes include that Bitcoin Unlimited gains a majority of hashing power and starts mining bigger blocks. In the event of a fork, a proof-of-work change could be done to defend the minority chain from miner attacks. And lately a proposal was brought forward to activate SegWit without the support of the hashing power.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/179
For decades, science and academia have leveraged distributed computing to solve massive computational problems. Distributed grid computing schemes allow donors to volunteer their desktop computer’s idle resources toward scientific projects in physics, biology, and chemistry, where large amounts of parallel computing resources are necessary. Relying on software like BONIC, these networks provide features such as built-in fault tolerance and result verification. And with the proliferation of mobile and IoT, the potential for massively distributed grid networks has never been greater.
Gilles Fedak, a researcher at the French computer science research body Inria, joins us to discuss a new project which aims to build a high-performance distributed cloud infrastructure marketplace. Relying on mature grid computing technologies, iExec utilizes Ethreum to organize a peer-to-peer marketplace of computing resources, allowing anyone to rent their idle resources to grid networks. If it succeeds to execute on its vision, this game-changing project could revolutionize distributed computing through cost reduction and the commoditization of resources.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/178
Bitcoin and Ethereum miners collectively make up what is perhaps the most powerful computational resource in the world. However, mobile phones from the early 2000’s could arguably run more complex operations than these networks combined. While blockchains themselves may never reach the level of computational power of modern computers, they may be leveraged as the underlying verification layer for centralized computing.
We’re joined by Jason Teutsch and Christian Reitwiessner. They are the co-authors of a visionary whitepaper which describes Truebit. This protocol would allow complex computations to be executed on off-chain systems while being validated by Ethereum miners. The results of these computations would consequently be available to on-chain smart contracts. Truebit makes clever use of proof systems and game theory to build a protocol where a Task Giver can ask a third party, the Solver, to execute a complex computation in exchange for a reward. Not limited to Solidity, these could be executed in traditional languages such as Go, Python or C++. Verifiers could then challenge the results, incentivising the Solver to be honest or see his reward be stripped away. This incentive structure would guarantee fast and reliable results while eliminating the need for a trusted third party.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/177
In the world of Bitcoin podcast, there is one show which definitely stands out as the longest running, Let’s Talk Bitcoin! In its 4-year history, the show has produced over 320 episodes and expanded to become a network of podcasts which includes Epicenter and many others.
We’re joined by Adam B. Levine the founder and host of Let’s Talk Bitcoin! It was thanks to Adam that Sébastien and Brian first connected in 2013, so in many ways, we consider him as the “”spiritual grandfather”” of Epicenter. Adam reflects on his signature show and the network he created in 2014. He discusses the future of the network and makes an announcement live on the show, which even takes us by surprise.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/176
For a long time the native asset of the Ripple network XRP was the cryptocurrency with the second biggest market cap. But with much of the supply controlled by Ripple, it remained surrounded by controversy. Still, XRP remains an interesting asset to enable cross-border payments in the future. Miguel Vias recently joined Ripple after a long career on Wall Street to develop XRP as a liquid and widely accepted asset.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/175
In the footsteps of the finance industry, the energy sector has been caught by the blockchain fever. Conceived over a century ago, increased usage and an explosion of devices have made energy grids outdated. Smart grids offer a two-way dialogue where electricity and information are exchanged between utilities and its customers. This new grid takes advantages of connected devices and green energy production to provide more reliability, security and sustainability.
Carsten Stöcker, Senior Manager Machine Economy & Blockchain at Innogy, shares his vision for how blockchains will serve as the transactional fabric for tomorrow’s smart grids. In this new paradigm, energy is locally produced and blockchains provide the rails on which local energy marketplaces can be built. The German utility has been conducting blockchain experiments for several years and is soon releasing the Mobility Transaction Platform moveX. The Ethereum-powered platform will serve an ecosystem of electric vehicles with transaction layer needed for charging, car sharing and mobility as a service.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/174
Writing his college thesis on Bitcoin in 2012 and becoming Coinbase’s first employee in 2013, Olaf Carlson-Wee has been at the forefront of cryptocurrency for many years. Recently, he left Coinbase to start Polychain Capital, a hedge fund focused solely on investing in cryptocurrencies and protocol tokens. Olaf joined us to discuss his journey in the industry and the investment thesis behing Polychain.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/173
With both the Bitcoin Unlimited and Segregated Witness efforts far from reaching majority support and exploding transaction fees, the debate around how to scale Bitcoin continues on. One of the key arguments against bigger blocks and Bitcoin Unlimited is that a blocksize restriction is needed to create a healthy fee market. Dr Peter Rizun has been researching the economics of transaction fees in Bitcoin extensively and joined us to discuss what dynamics affect fees and why he thinks the blocksize limit will eventually fall.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/172
Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin joined us once again to discuss the state of Ethereum and the efforts to innovate the protocol. We covered the takeaways from the DAO fork, switching to the proof-of-stake system Casper and how to think about blockchain interoperability.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/171
One of the key issues with blockchain networks is the lack of interoperability. In the early days of Bitcoin, blockchain interoperability was far from people’s minds. However, as new networks continued to emerge and gain traction, the ability to move assets freely from one blockchain to another has become a critical feature.
We’re joined by Jae Kwon, CEO and Founder of Tendermint, the team which is launching the Cosmos Network. Cosmos aims to build the internet of blockchains: A global network of blockchains, connected through hubs that allow trustless token transfer. Jae joined us to discuss the Cosmos vision, the underlying Tendermint consensus algorithm and upcoming fundraiser.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/170
There is no doubt that proof of work, introduced in the Bitcoin white paper, has stood the test of time as a robust and resilient Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus mechanism. However, many issues may prevent Nakamoto Consensus from securely scaling over the long term. The risk of validator centralization, network forking, block scarcity and high energy costs required to mine a block have all been extensively debated with no realistic long-term solutions to date. A new paper titled “Algorand” attempts to addresses these problems.
We’re pleased to be joined by Professor Silvio Micali, a computer scientist at MIT, who is known for his work in many of the technologies blockchains rely on today. As one of the co-inventors of zero-knowledge proofs, he has been decorated with a number of prizes and awards, including the Turing Award, which he received in 2012 for his work in cryptography.
Prof. Micali describes the concept of Algorand, an alternative approach to proof of work which offers high security guarantees while allowing the network to scale with demand. Relying only on a trivial amount of computation to validate transactions, Algorand also reduces the probability of network forks to near-zero. It uses novel mechanisms to select validators for blocks and enabling them to come to consensus on them.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/169
In the last year, blockchain protocols have matured at an exciting pace. Open source projects like Ethereum, the Eris stack and Tendermint are behind much of the experimentation being conducted at leading companies. These protocols would not be where they are today if it wasn’t for the hard work of dedicated open source developers.
One of those people is Rick Dudley. An opinionated and passionate developer, Rick is involved in multiple projects. He works as a DevOps at Monax, works closely with Vlad Zamfir on implementing Casper in Ethereum, is a leading member of the Coala organization and is Founder and CEO of the startup Vulcanize. Rick gives us insider insights on Ethereum and on how the project may evolve, in particular, once Casper is implemented and when more robust, strongly typed language VMs are made available to the protocol.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/168
After the successful Ethereum crowdfunding campaign, musician and web developer Peter Harris saw a path to creating a fair, decentralized music streaming platform. Out of that Resonate was born. Peter joined us to discuss why the dysfunctional structure of the music industry results in a bad deal for musicians and why a decentralized platform supported by blockchain technology and run as a cooperative represents a better way forward.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/167
Years into the controversy around how to scale Bitcoin, there have been many challengers to Bitcoin core’s dominance. After XT, Classic and others have faded, Bitcoin Unlimited has been gaining traction and emerged as plausible new way forward.
Bitcoin Unlimited wants to make the block size a parameter that is set by miners and nodes, but not fixed at a network level. They argue a natural fee market would emerge, allowing Bitcoin to rapidly scale and realizing its promise of electronic cash as well as store of value. The project is also member-driven, with democratic decisions driving its development decisions.
Core developer G. Andrew Stone and Bitcoin Unlimited President Andrew Clifford joined us for the episode.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/166
It’s been an eventful year in the blockchain space, for the Epicenter podcast, and its hosts. Brian, Meher and Sebastien look back on 2016 and provide a few personal updates, give their thoughts and insights on how the space evolved, and make predictions on where they feel the industry will go in the next year.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain, Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/165
Ari Juels, a Professor at Cornell Tech (Jacobs Institute) and former Chief Scientist of RSA, joins us to discuss his work two of his blockchain-related research topics: Authenticated Data Feeds for Smart Contracts and criminal smart contracts.
One of the shortcomings of decentralized smart contracts is their inability to retrieve information from the outside world. Smart contracts can’t make API calls to websites and data feeds, but rely on oracles to feed real-world information to the chain. This potentially requires a high trust in the oracle operators. Authenticated data feeds promise to solve the problem by relying on Intel’s novel SGX hardware.
We also talked about how criminals could use smart contracts to more efficiently conduct crimes such as incentivizing the theft of private keys or even soliciting real-world crimes such as murder.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/164
Roger Ver is one of the earliest Bitcoin investors and through his tireless evangelizing of the cryptocurrency became known as ‘Bitcoin Jesus’. Roger joined us to discuss Bitcoin’s incredible potential to foster liberty. We also discussed how the current stalemate about how to scale Bitcoin is threatening that potential. And, finally, the mining pool operated by his site Bitcoin.com that is supporting the Bitcoin Unlimited client.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/163
Few crypto projects have gotten as much attention and caused as much controversy as Steem. The blockchain-based social media platform launched early this year and managed to gain real user traction building up a vibrant community of contributors. The Steem token quickly entered bubble territory reaching a market cap of almost $400m and losing 90% of its value since.
Steem Co-Founder and CEO Ned Scott joined us to discuss the ambition of the project and its short tumultous history. We also discussed some of the accusations against Steem and its unorthodox launch.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/162
In their relatively short lifespan, blockchain technologies have already undergone significant milestones. Bitcoin’s blockchain, often referred to as Blockchain 1.0, features a simple database ledger that records transactions in a chronological order and represents the state of the network to participants. Ethereum, or Blockchain 2.0, introduced the notion of smart contracts. Microsoft’s Bletchley Project introduces a new modular architecture which might mark a new milestone for blockchain technologies.
Marley Gray, Principal Program Manager Blockchain at Microsoft, joins us to talk about Microsoft’s approach to blockchain architecture. With enterprise in mind, Bletchley introduces the concept of “Cryptlets”, the core building blocks for introducing a secure middleware tier into blockchain application infrastructure. These computational units, running off-chain, on secure trusted container enclave hardware, could provide trusted data to on-chain smart contract logic.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/161
As a lead developer of the Apache webserver and founder of the Apache Software Foundation, Brian Behlendorf has played a central role in building internet architecture. Recently, he became Executive Director of the Hyperledger Project that aims to build foundational blockchain technology in an open-source, collaborative way.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/160
Stratumn CEO Richard Caetano and Head of Research Anuj das Gupta joined us to discuss their work to bring security and integrity to processes. We covered the philosophy behind the company and why they use cryptography and other technologies coming out of the crypto space while shunning a classical blockchain design.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/159
System scalability and extensibility of system features are two central problems around which research in the cryptocurrency / blockchain industry has centered. For example, the Blockstream sidechains project foresaw hundreds of blockchains coordinating together to form an ‘Internet of Chains’ delivering extensibility to the Bitcoin system.
Recently, Dr. Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum and Parity, put forth Polkadot, a technical vision to achieve the similar end-goals using different system architecture. Polkadot could enable individual blockchain networks to share security and communications infrastructure with other blockchain networks, forming in effect an ‘Internet of Blockchain networks’.
Melonport, a team based out of Zurich, has taken up the challenge of deploying the Polkadot network and also building decentralized asset management software on the same network. In this episode we converse with Mona El Isa and Reto Trinkler, co-founders of Melonport, in order to discover more about the overall vision.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/158
String Labs founders Tom Ding and Dominic Williams joined us to discuss their project DFINITY, a next-generation blockchain network. Through leveraging technological advances, DFINITY aims to deliver an infinitely scalable decentralized cloud that will be able to power applications from decentralized search to supply chain applications. We covered DFINITY’s approach to scalability, interoperability, consensus as well as their sophisticated approach to governance: The Blockchain Nervous System.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/157
As is the case with most luxury goods, the diamond industry is faced with the issues of theft, fraud, and counterfeiting. Illegal activity is present at every level of the supply chain, which collectively costs the industry and its insurers hundreds of millions of dollars each year. In recent years, international treaties and regulation have been put in place in an attempt to combat illegal activity, but criminals are most often a step ahead.
Leanne Kemp, CEO of Everledger, joins us to explain how her company is using advanced geological techniques, and blockchains, to bring more traceability to the diamond industry. Everledger, whose clients include many of the largest insurance companies, builds software which allows for a diamond’s unique characteristics to be hashed and notarized in the blockchain. Hence, a stone’s provenance, and the trail of ownership can be traced, therefore limiting the opportunities for fraud and making it difficult for stolen diamonds to re-enter the market.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/156
Attracting over 70 of the world’s biggest financial institutions to its consortium in just over a year, R3 has accomplished a formidable task. Aiming to rethink the fabric of the financial system, they first conducted experiments testing blockchain platforms for their member and last year began developing their own distributed ledger platform: Corda.
The effort to build Corda was lead by R3 CTO Richard Brown and the former Bitcoin developer and R3 lead architect Mike Hearn. In a wide-ranging discussion, we covered the vision of the project and why it represents a radical departure from existing blockchain platforms.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/155
As content becomes more and more abundant and immediately available at our fingertips, our limited attention is a barrier for those whose business it is to attract and harness it. In this context, large (social) media companies understand that attention is a scarce commodity, and, as has been demonstrated, those who control attention wield enormous power over our society.
We’re joined by Greg Meredith, CTO of Synereo, to talk about how this new Blockchain platform rebuild the attention economy. In a sense, Synereo is to attention, what Bitcoin is to money, in effect, removing intermediaries from the transaction between those who have attention, and those who wish to attract it. Greg, also gives his insights on how functional programming languages could allow for verifiable computational smart contracts.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/154
A topic which is often discussed is the limited use of Ethereum applications without stable cryptocurrencies. Prediction markets are a prime example of this. When one makes a prediction using Ether, he or she is in fact entering into to speculations: one being the outcome of the actual prediction, the other being the price of Ether when the prediction resolves. Projects like Maker DAO try to solve the problem by developing complex systems to ensure that a blockchain token keeps its value in sync with fiat currencies. But Decentralized Capital is taking a different approach by issuing fiat-pegged tokens on Ethereum that are backed by bank deposits. CEO Alex Wearn joined us to explain their approach to providing a fundamental piece of Ethereum infrastructure.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/153
In 2012, a year after discovering Bitcoin in Argentina, Dutch economist Tuur Demeester became one of the first people to advocate investing in Bitcoin to a mainstream audience. Tuur joined us to discuss his thesis for investing in Bitcoin and how it has evolved over time. We also talked about the road ahead and how other cryptocurrencies and Ethereum compare as investment opportunities.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/152
Before 2013 few people paid attention to Bitcoin and blockchain, yet even back in the 1990s a vibrant group of prioneers pursued the vision of financial cryptography and digital cash. One of these was financial cryptographer and software developer Ian Grigg, who today works as an architecture consultant for R3.
Grigg joined us for a discussion of the history of the digital cash, Bitcoin and his work on Ricardian Contracts, which foreshadowed today’s smart contracts.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/151
Last week the biggest blockchain-focused developer conference took place in Shanghai, China: Ethereum’s DevCon 2. Epicenter show host Meher Roy was at the conference and brought back his impressions and insights for a comprehensive discussion of the current state of Ethereum projects and the Ethereum community.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/150
That blockchains represents a fundamental technological revolution has become widely accepted. What is still more nebulous, but could turn out just as disruptive is how smart contracts while transform the legal system and our understanding of what contracts are and how they work.
Legal researcher Lukas Abegg who is currently finishing his PhD on copyright issues around 3d printing and has been researching smart contracts as well joined us to discuss the question whether code is law and what blockchain can learn form 3d printing.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/149
We’re joined by Kyle Torpey, a freelance writer, and journalist who writes for a number of publications in the blockchain space including Bitcoin Magazine, Coin Journal, and others. Know for his well-written articles and in-depth reporting on the important topics affecting Bitcoin today, Kyle provides his point of view on the scalability debate and gives an update on the recent and upcoming changes to the bitcoin protocol.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/148
With academic research on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies still in its infancy, Sarah Meiklejohn’s track record of publications in the area stands out. The UCL computer science professor has explored topics ranging from anonymity in Bitcoin to how a central bank could go about issuing a cryptocurrency.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/147
In the last 20 years, content publishing platforms have proliferated to an almost insane number. There are countless places where people and companies can post articles, blogs, videos, photos, live content and so on. Despite this diverse offering, little innovation has happened in monetizing content, which still mostly remains ad-based.
We’re joined by Ryan X. Charles, Bitcoin Developer and Founder of Yours. Yours would like to address the monetization problem by allowing content producers to earnBitcoin when they create good content. Yours is an in-browser application which implements a Bitcoin wallet and enables micro-transactions through their own implementation of the Lightning Network. Content Creators are paid by Curators who attribute value to the content. Curators are themselves rewarded when content they find valuable goes viral.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/146
One of the sectors which is ripe for disruption is the real estate industry. In the US for instance, a handful of historic and very powerful players operate what is known as MLS, or Multiple Listing Services, and hold unofficial monopolies on residential and commercial real estate listings. Brokers, who depend on these listing services to sell properties, agree that their incumbent positions have created a situation where fees have continued to rise, while little to no added value has been added for their users.
Stephen King and Russel McLernon join us to explain RexMLS, a decentralized Multiple Listing Service built on Ethereum and IPFS. Currently in beta, the DApp would allow brokers to list properties at a very low cost, and be accessible to international markets, something which is lacking in the current model.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/145
From BitShares to his central role during the inception of Ethereum Charles Hoskinson has continually influenced key projects in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space. After departing the Ethereum project in 2014, he has recently stepped back into the limelight by pledging support and resources to turn the fledgling Ethereum fork ETC into a viable project.
Charles joined us together with Alex Chepurnoy, a developer at his company IOHK. Besides Ethereum Classic, we talked about IOHK and Scorex, IOHK’s modular blockchain framework project that Alex Chepurnoy has been leading.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/144
Prediction markets are fascinating financial instruments which have proven to be accurate at making predictions on things like the outcome of elections, geopolitical events and sporting events. But in our heavily regulated financial world, they are the subject of much controversy. In 2013 for instance, a well-known US prediction market, Intrade, was forced to shut down following a civil suit filed by the CFTC. While some people consider prediction markets to be a useful tool for society, others consider them to be a form of gambling, which is one of the reasons why they have been met with such resistance in certain countries. A purely decentralized prediction market would operate outside the scope of the regulated financial world and be resistant to censorship and outside intervention.
We’re joined by Joey Krug, Co-Founder and Core Developer at Augur, a decentralized prediction market built on Ethreum. The project, which was initially meant to be a Bitcoin sidechain, has ported to Ethereum and is currently in beta on the Testnet. Users can forecast real-world events, such as the outcome of the US election, and earn profits if they are accurate in their predictions. Reporting on events is crowdsourced using a consensus-based system similar to proof-of-stake.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/143
Blockchain smart contracts are self-executing contracts composed of computer code. These programs, which are executed by the entirety of the network, enforce the rules described within the code. Effectively, in this realm, code is law. And as we’ve seen recently, altering the outcome of that code after it has been deloyed, should we later realize that it was flawed or did not produce an intended result, can be messy. In addition, there are instances where human intervention can be necessary or even desirable. Take a mortgage agreement for example. Should a smart contract be entrusted with the responsibility of making a decision when the borrower can no longer make his payments? In cases such as this, subjective human intervention is be necessary.
Scot Farrell and Claire Warren, lawyers at the global law firm King & Wood Mallesons, think that humans should not be automated out of every process. While code is logical and predictable, it cannot act reasonably or take into account certain unforeseen events. They have proposed DnA contracts (Digital and Analog), where automation can occur when absolute automation is possible, but where humans may intervene at the edges and provide input when needed.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/142
Legendary scientist and cryptography pioneer Ralph Merkle joined us to discuss his recent paper on DAOs. Merkle examined how the voting mechanisms in today’s democracies are flawed and how a decentralized, transparent DAO making decisions using prediction markets could create more efficient democratic systems.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/141
Exchanges are often criticized as a central point of failure of the cryptocurrency space. This isn’t without justification as, in recent years, we have seen a number of exchanges get hacked, robbed, or embezzled by their founders, which is far from insignificant. One proposed alternative are decentralized exchanges that would allow people make peer-to-peer trades using sophisticated smart contracts. However, there remains the fundamental challenge of interfacing with the legacy banking system.
Manfred Karrer joins us for a lengthy discussion on Bitsquare, a decentralized cryptocyrrency exchange which supports most fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies. Built to be a decentralized equivalent of LocalBitcoins, the Bitsquare client, which connects to the peer-to-peer network, uses Tor by default, which makes it almost completely anonymous. There are also a number of safeguards in place to eliminate the potential for fraud and theft, as well as an arbitration system to resolve disputes between traders.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/140
Few things arouse among free market believers and enthusiasts of decentralization as prediction markets do. By allowing people to bet on any range of outcomes they promise more efficient markets and better information. Few people have worked with as much dedication on making the promise of prediction markets a reality as Martin Köppelmann.
After founding the Bitcoin prediction market Fairlay, he turned to Ethereum and started the Ethereum-based prediction market Gnosis. We discussed his views on the DAO heist, differences between Fairlay and Gnosis and their upcoming tokensale.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/139
Security researcher and RSK co-founder Sergio Lerner joined us to discuss RSK (also Rootstock), the project to launch a turing-complete smart contract sidechain to Bitcoin. We talked about how he got into the industry, spending countless days analyzing Bitcoin for vulnerabilities and finding a few along the way. And, of course, RSK, the ambitious project to strenghten the Bitcoin ecosystem through adding smart contract capabilities.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/138
With recent news surrounding The DOA and the Brexit vote causing a stir in the blockchain world and beyond, it seems like a regulatory update is due. So we called up our favorite regulatory affairs specialist Siân Jones to enlighten us on some of the recent developments in Bitcoin and blockchain regulation.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/137
The lack of an explicit governance mechanism has created deep problems for Bitcoin. Ethereum, with the DAO-related soft/hard-fork discussions, may face similar challenges ahead. Yet, already in 2014 Arthur Breitman quietly started working on cryptocurrency network Tezos that has an explicit mechanism to let coinholders vote on protocol upgrades.
Our discussion with Breitman centered around how explicit governance could lead to a more secure and evolutionary protocol. We also discussed Tezos’ approach to smart contract that tries to prevent bug-riddled and insecure smart contracts such as the DAO which has thrown Ethereum into a deep crisis.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/136
For many the promise of decentralized applications and DAOs is to be beyond the limitations and rigidity of the existing legal system. There is no question that where DAOs can roam freely, innovation can accelerate. But can the law, courts and regulations be left behind so easily?
Lawyer Stephen Palley joined us to discuss what happens when the new and old worlds collide and how courts will look at what goes on in the land of DAOs and DApps.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/135
Raising $150m+ through its toke sale, ‘The DAO’ has become the most notable decentralized application to date. The ambitious goal of the project is to form an decentralized organizations that efficiently makes investment decisions and generates a return for the token holders.
Computer Science professor Emin Gün Sirer and researcher Vlad Zamfir joined us to discuss the various security issues with the daring project and why they’ve called for a temporary moratorium on funding proposals.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/134
One of the problems often cited when talking about cryptocurrencies is their level of volatility compared to traditional fiat currencies. This makes most cryptocurrencies a poor instrument for storing value, and introduces complexities when making purchases in fiat amounts. Stable cryptocurrencies include mechanisms which allow them to stay pegged to fiat currencies like the US Dollar or Euro. They present a number of advantages, and, in addition to taking the headache out of making purchases, can be used by cryptocurrency traders who need a stable unit of account for hedging their assets.
We talk to brothers Pascal and Julien Hamonic, Core Members of the Nu team about the NuBit stable cryptocurrency. Similarly to the mechanisms that keep our body temperature stable, NuBits relies upon the introduction of new coins into circulation when demand increases, and for coins to be taken out of circulation when demand drops. Shareholders (NuShareholder) vote on these measures as the network relies on custodians who bring liquidity into the market in exchange for dividends, and on speculators who “”park”” coins in exchange for potential returns when demand increases again.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/133
In this episode we welcome back Stephan Tual, the COO of Slock.It, a German startup working at the intersection of the Internet of Things and the Ethereum blockchain. Slock.It’s small team also wrote the smart contracts that power ‘The DAO’, a decentralized capital management entity that recently raised north of $160 million for investing into Ethereum based projects. ‘The DAO’ has been featured in many mainstream news outlets, such as New York Times, Wall Street Journal and the Economist.
The interview explores the vision, motivation and challenges behind both ‘The DAO’ and Slock.It.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/132
One of the foundational problems in payment networks is that they are mostly uninteroperable. This problem exists at all levels, from consumer payment solutions like PayPal, to national and multi-national banks. This complexity is brought on by the proprietary nature of payment networks, and moving value from one to another requires a negotiation between parties on which common payment network to use in a transaction. We saw similar problems in the early days of the Internet, assembled around protocols which allow for data to be routed and move between networks in a standardized way.
We’re joined by Stefan Thomas and Evan Schwartz, co-creators of Interledger. This neutral protocol would bring the same level of interoperability we know take for granted around the flow of data, to payments, thus allowing money to move freely across networks. A market maker, who holds accounts in both networks, would receive funds in escrow from a sender, and move funds to an escrow account with the receiver, getting paid by the sender when he shows the proof the funds were delivered to the receiver.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/131
In the short history of the Bitcoin industry, there has been an impressive amount of high profile hacks, ranging from a few hundred thousand to many millions of dollars. In all of these, customers, Bitcoin users, where robbed of their funds because poor security policies, negligence, incompetence, or plain old scamming. Recently, the cryptocurrency conversion service ShapeShift fell victim to a hack in which over $200,000 of company funds were stolen, initially by an employee, and then by a hacker to whom this employee had sold sensitive company information. Luckily, no customers lost any money as ShapeShift does not hold any funds on behalf of users.
We talked to ShapeShift CEO Erik Voorhees who walks us through this captivating ordeal, which sounds like it could be the plot of a movie. He speaks about how the company is trying to recover and what he has learned from this unfortunate event.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/130
As the blockchain field continues evolving rapidly, Sebastien, Meher and Brian take some time to discuss the current environment and the longer term implications of blockchains. We discussed how smart contracts could affect the pace of innovation and the competitiveness of industries. We also talked about the role DAOs will play and what we can take away from the current DAO crowdsale and its connection with Slock.it.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain, Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/129
When Jed McCaleb discovered Bitcoin, there didn’t even exist an online marketplace to trade the cryptocurrency yet. The experienced founder who had earlier started file sharing site eDonkey, acted fast and started the first Bitcoin exchange MtGox which he later sold to now-infamous Mark Karpeles. Jed later founded the pioneering Ripple project before leaving to start Stellar.
We discussed his journey through the industry and the ambitious plans Stellar has to create an open financial system that will give access to financial services to a much broader spectrum of humanity.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/128
We were joined by repeat guest Anthony di Iorio, a definite contender for having (co-)founded the most projects in the blockchain space including Ethereum, Kryptokit, Decentral and Jaxx. We got an update on the vibrant Toronto blockchain scene and Decentral. The main discussion revolved around the new wallet Jaxx that is simultaneously a Bitcoin and Ethereum wallet and takes a significant step towards a more unified and accessible cryptocurrency experience. Finally, we discussed his recent appointment as Chief Digital Officer at the Toronto Stock Exchange / TMX Group and the upcoming trade show Blockchain World Expo.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/127
One of the major drawbacks of Bitcoin is its low transaction throughput. Maxing out only a handful of operations per second, there have been many proposals to scale it up so that it can compete with existing distributed database technologies. As the blockchain’s demand continues to increase, it’s unclear if the Bitcoin protocol will ever be able to handle thousands, if not millions of transactions per second. BigchainDB is taking a different approach. Rather than trying to scale up blockchain technology, it starts with a big data distributed database, RethinkDB, and adds blockchain features and characteristics.
Trent Mcconaghy, Co-founder and CTO of Ascribe and BigchainDB, joins us to talk about how this protocol may become to databases, what IPFS and Ethereum are to distributed filestorage and computing, respectively. Able to perform more than one million writes per second and capacities in the petabytes, BigchainDB has the ambition to become the world’s public database platform.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/126
The relatively new concept of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), is often praised as a new type of organizational structure that has no identifiable owner or owners, and whose actions are automated and determined solely by a pre-defined set of rules. Views on DAOs differ widely. On one hand, members of the Bitcoin/blockchain space often portrayal them as AI-like swarm organisms, free from the shackles of nation-states, and that can act at will regardless of laws or regulation. On the other hand, legal experts caution that, like corporations, DAOs and their creators could be held liable in civil lawsuits, and that they may be served a hard dose of reality when they end up in court.
We are joined by Florian Glatz, attorney, researcher and software developer (not to mention the proud owne r of the awesome domain name blockchain.lawyer). We discuss some of the basic legal concepts surrounding contracts and in what ways smart contracts may or may not fit within our existing legal framework. We also dive deep into DAOs, and address some of the challenges they may pose in the near and distant future.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/125
The challenges Bitcoin’s wild volatility represents for achieving mass adoption have made the necessity for stable cryptocurrencies apparent long ago. With Ethereum applications, the problem is even more apparent as many use cases from predcition markets to insurance are impractical using the even more volatile ether. Maker DAO is an ambitious attempt to solve the problem by building a bank-like system to issue a value-stable currency on Ethereum.
Rune Christensen joined us to discuss the need for Maker and the complex system to guarantee stability.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/124
We’re joined by , Chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation, investor and all around emblematic figure of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Brock tells his story, from his early beginning a entrepreneur in his teens, to the massively successfull video game industry businesses he built in the early 2000s.
As Chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation, he gives us his perspective on how the Foundation’s role has evolved over time and its areas of focus going forward. Brock also weighs in the recent debates around governance and block size.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/123
For Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn, part of the cypherpunk movement since the early 1990s, the vision of a decentralized financial system that has both openness and privacy has existed since long before Bitcoin. After many failed attempts, Bitcoin proved that that vision could be achievable. But Bitcoin also failed to deliver on the privacy features as blockchain analysis allows tracing movements and deanonymizing many users.
Zooko joined us to discuss his project Zcash, a fully anonymous cryptocurrency that is scheduled to launch in July. Through Zcash’s use of ground-breaking Zero Knowledge Proofs (or zkSNARKs) the blockchain will leak no information about sender, recipients nor amounts. It was a fascinating discussion of the most anticipated launch of a cryptocurrency since Ethereum.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/122
For orthodox Bitcoiners central banks are often seen as the incarnation of evil. But , alas, in the case of two Carribean central banking economists the feeling of reprehension wasn’t reciprocated. Winston Moore and Jeremy Stephen were formerly associated with the Central Bank of Barados and fascinated by the potential of cryptocurrencies, they explored the consequences of their central bank holding Bitcoin as part of their international reserves. They joined us for a discussion of central banking, the pecularities of monetary policy in a small island nation and what Bitcoin could bring to the equation.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/121
The problem around content monetization is one which content producers are constantly trying to solve. At the core of this problem is a mismatch between supply and demand. Content, which is increasingly abundant, is captured by human attention, which is in limited supply. The volume of content being produced is growing at staggering rates while total human attention remains flat.
Our guest, , argues that the current content monetization model is outdated, broken and is in need of an overhaul. Previously at Google and YouTube, Maciej has a broad understanding content monetization models and lays out a vision for open marketplaces for attention using blockchains. He argues that content discovery systems like the Google Page Rank algorithm and Facebook’s News Feed could be replaced by open networks based on the mechanics of Bitcoin.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/120
A pioneering feature of Bitcoin is verifiability of transactions: It is designed to enable low-power devices and high end computers alike to be able to verify occurrences on the blockchain.
This observation led our guest, Adam Gibson, to wonder why webpages aren’t so easily verifiable as a Bitcoin transaction? Can I prove to you that I have certain bank account balance over the internet? Why do we submit photocopies of passports rather than furnishing a cryptographically verifiable proof of citizenship by logging on to a Government site?
Born out of this intellectual itch is the TLS Notary protocol. It pioneers a new kind of auditing that enables participants to prove that a certain https page was in their browser. This protocol paves the way to brilliant designs for Proof of Reserves, Smart contract oracles and Decentralised fiat-to-bitcoin exchange.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/119
A typical online transaction today isn’t very different from how it was done 25 years ago at the dawn of the Internet. In fact, online payments haven’t changed much at all. When we want to pay for something online, we copy very sensitive credit card information into a form on a website and trust that website to capture it securely and make proper use of it. If this seems like an old and antiquated way to pay, that’s because it is, and it costs billions of dollars per year in security and fraud prevention. The World Wide Web Consortium wants to standardize the way we pay online, making it more secure, and hopefully a better experience for users.
is a computer scientists and Standards Lead at the W3C. We talk about some of the core problems with dealing with credentials on the web and making online payments. Specifically, we discuss the Web Payments Working Group (WPWG), and their efforts to bring banks, payments providers and browser manufacturers together to converge around a standard set APIs to make for a better and more secure payment experience for all users.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/118
In the midst of the heated blocksize debate one could be forgiven to think that there is very little Bitcoin developers are able to agree on. Yet, when core developer and Blockstream co-founder Pieter Wuille introduced the concept of segregated witness at the Scaling Bitcoin conference in Hong Kong most of the Bitcoin community quickly rallied behind the proposal.
Eric Lombrozo, CEO of wallet company Ciphrex and responsible for running the segregated witness testnet, joined us to discuss the proposal and its implications. Segregated witness, it turns out, does not only provide an elegant way to increase the blocksize via a soft-fork, it also solves transaction malleability and greatly simplifies updating the Bitcoin’s scripting language. It’s a crucial topic and may well enable a new wave of accelerated innovation in Bitcoin.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/117
Zero Knowledge Proofs are methods of providing cryptographic proofs to another party while keeping some information secret. The simple concept of ZKP offer tantalizing possibilities: Banks could prove solvency without revealing depositors. Governments could prove the fairness of an election without compromising privacy.
Computer science professor Eli Ben-Sasson joined us to discuss where blockchains and cryptocurrencies intersect with Zero Knowledge Proofs and related technologies such as zkSNARKs. It offered a fascinating view into what will surely become a core part of blockchain tech in the future.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/116
The idea that in the future tokens will play a crucial role in networks and organizations to incentivize decentralized collaboration and reward contribution is not new. It’s the original decentralized autonomous organization idea that has informed many projects that have been on the podcast (Swarm, Ethereum, Factom, Storj, etc). For Matan, the vision originally led to found decentralized ride-sharing application LaZooz. One year ago, he left LaZooz to found Backfeed, which is building the tools that so far have been missing to make mass collaboration without a central party possible.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/115
Vinay Gupta has been a programmer, 1990s cypherpunk, ‘resilience guru’, Ethereum release coordinator and currently collaborates with Consensys to mainstream smart contract technology. He also invented the Hexayurt, a cheap and resilient architectural structure for disaster-stricken communities.
Recently, Vinay has become a thought leader in the cryptocurrency space. He is famed for his eloquence and ability to distill the crypto-finance technological paradigm into easy big-picture visualisations. Check out this podcast for some unique insights into technology, politics and history.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/114
As blockchain technologies mature, new protocol specifications are emerging, which take unique approaches to software design and how consensus is achieved. We have talked about Multchain and OpenChain in the past, but Tendermint promises to be a viable solution for many permissioned blockchain use cases. It’s design is modular, meaning that the application layer (smart contract) and the consensus layer are completely independent. This provides added flexibility and allows for business logic to be written in practically any programming language. In addition, its unique approach to consensus, a round-robin Proof-of-Skate algorithm, is much better suited for permissioned blockchain scenarios than Proof-of-Work.
Meher and Sebastien talk to Tendermint co-founders, Jae Kwon, Dustin Byington and Ethan Buchman, about this promising new blockchain protocol and how it is different from other projects we’ve seen so far.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/113
Permissionable blockchains have gained much attention from enterprise this past year, and specifically, the traditional fiance and FinTech sectors. As new protocols emerge and the technology is matures, it is becoming apparent they are simply a new class of database, one which integrates business logic (smart contracts) and a consensus layer (PoS, PoW, etc).
is the CEO of Eris Industries, a company which specializes in building permissioned blockchain systems for enterprise. Their aim is to deliver the technologies which enable companies to easily build and deploy applications which make use of blockchain and smart contract technologies.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/112
Andrew Miller is a computer science PhD student at the University of Maryland who focuses on cryptocurrency. Having gotten involved in Bitcoin in 2011 and focused on cryptocurrencies early in his research work, he is one of the most prolific researchers in the field.
Our discussion mainly focused on security aspects of Ethereum including their gas model, Proof-of-Work algorithm and plans to switch to Proof-of-Stake.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/111
With over 600,000 views, James D’Angelo’s educational videos at the World Bitcoin Network are among the most popular resources on Bitcoin. Besides his excellent technical explanation, he has also been vocal about the dangers of the increasing centralization of mining.
James joined us to talk about his background as a rapper, the World Bitcoin Network, his proposal to use the Bitcoin blockchain to fight climate change and his argument that keeping Bitcoin decentralized would require sacrificing the anonymity of miners.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/110
Identity is probably one of the most important constructs in our society. In our modern world, protecting one’s identity has become complex, as we no longer rely solely on governments to prove who we are. In addition, most identity sources can be easily compromised. Credit cards and social security numbers weren’t developed with the Internet in mind, and other identifiers such as logins and passwords aren’t well suited truly secure authentication and authorisation.
We’re joined by Tim Pastoor, Founder of 2way.io, to discuss how we can improve control of our identities using concepts borrowed from Bitcoin. Tim walks us through how people could better manage different identities and build reputation networks using Identifi, a global address book protocol invented by Martti Malmi, one of the very first Bitcoin users. We also talk what role this system could play in the future as autonomous agents and artificial intelligence become more prevalent.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/109
The Bitcoin and blockchain industry has been through a lot this year. While the Bitcoin price has experienced relative stability, perhaps indicating slow growth, the space has grown into a rich and diverse ecosystem of startups and open technologies. Through inspiring proof-of-concepts and exciting use cases, blockchain technologies have gained legitimacy as a viable technology to improve transparency, reduce costs and optimise processes, to name a few of it’s benefits.
In this episode, all three Epicenter Bitcoin hosts, Brian, Sebastien and Meher, come together to look back on the events which marked the space this past year, and speculate on where thing may be heading in the future.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain, Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/108
Gideon Greenspan, a computer scientist and CEO/Founder of the Israeli startup Coin Sciences, joined us for a discussion of their private blockchain platform MultiChain. Besides diving into the popular question of what’s the point of a private blockchain, we covered his earlier colored coins implementation as well as his view that blockchains are best understood as a novel database paradigm.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/107
Christian Decker is a PhD student at ETH Zurich, where he is currently finishing up the world’s first PhD thesis entirely about Bitcoin. The computer scientist has been part of the Bitcoin community since 2009 and just recently turned off his last miner after 6.5 years!
We talked about the current scalability debate and what his research indicated what blocksize could reasonably be handled today. We also discussed his proposal for Duplex Micropayment Channels. Like the Lightning Network, Duplex Channels use a network of payment channels to enable cheap, instant and trustless offchain transactions. The proposal, which he is currently implementing, is one of the most promising approaches to scaling Bitcoin.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/106
With Proof-of-Stake (PoS) a blockchain is secured not by spending an external resource such as electricity but by using value internal to the chain itself. The promise of higher security at a lower cost is what also drives Ethereum to plan a move away from Proof-of-Work to PoS in the future.
Ethereum researcher Vlad Zamfir, who leads their effort in the complex search for the optimal PoS consensus system joined us for an in-depth discussion of the challenges of PoS, the approach Casper is taking and what consensus in Ethereum land could look like in the future.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/105
Businesses with the alleged potential to become the next Google are plentiful in Bitcoin-land, but finding actual commercial success is a lot harder. The best example of a commercial success is gift card company Gyft that became known as the first place to give access to a wide range of merchants for bitcoin holders and later achieved the largest exit so far in the crypto space in an acquisition by payments company First Data.
Gyft CTO joined us to talk about how he got involved in FinTech, what makes gift cards so interesting and how recently Gyft has been trying to reinvent gift cards by using the power of the blockchain.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/104
One of the concerns confronting the Bitcoin community is that of scaling the transaction throughput rate: How do we go from the current rate of approx. 5 transactions per second to a thousand times that?
In this episode, we talk to Emin Gun Sirer and Ittay Eyal from Cornell University regarding Bitcoin NG; a next generation Bitcoin blockchain design that addresses some protocol based limitations preventing Bitcoin from increasing transaction throughput.
Their proposal also enables fast (initial) transaction confirmations on the order of 10-20 seconds.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/103
Among the dividing themes in the Bitcoin space is the idea of public versus private blockchains. While some argue that private and permissioned blockchains can offer better scalability and lower latency for enterprises, others insist the Bitcoin blockchain will offer the best level of security and robustness longterm. Recently, projects have emerged that propose the best of both worlds by leveraging both off-chain and on-chain transactions.
This is the idea behind Openchain, an “open source distributed ledger technology, suited for organizations wishing to issue and manage digital assets in a robust, secure and scalable way.” Openchain uses a client-server model where there is only one authoritative validating node. Read-only observer nodes keep the central node honest by auditing transactions in real time. About every 10 minutes, a copy of the Ledger, and its transactions, is hashed and inserted into a Bitcoin transaction so that it can be fossilised in the blockchain.
We’re joined by Flavien Charlon, the one-man operation behind Predictious, Coinprism, the Open Transactions Protocol and now Openchain. We talk about this fascinating new software, which aims to offer enterprises a digital ledger protocol that is highly scalable while enjoying the benefits of the Bitcoin blockchain for immutability.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/102
A brilliant fact about crypto-economic blockchains is that they enable the construction of naming systems that transcend limits imposed by Zooko’s triangle. Traditional naming systems such as human names, Domain Name System (DNS) and Facebook profile names are subject to Zooko’s triangle and cannot be secure, human memorable and decentralised at once. For instance human names such as Meher Roy are human-memorable and decentralised but not secure (nothing prevents hundreds of people being called Meher Roy). Domain Names like are secure and human-memorable but require a central authority to hand out names.
OneName leverages Bitcoin to build a Global Identification system called blockchain ID. Blockchain IDs for users can be associated with real world identity data such as social media profiles, government issued papers etc. In this episode we converse with Ryan Shea and Muneeb Ali, co-founders and leaders of OneName, Blockstore and BlockStack. They explain the rationale and vision behind their push for a Global Decentralised Identification and Verification system.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/101
We’ve made it to episode 100! Our guest for our celebratory episode is Juan Benet, inventor of the Inter-Planetary File System and founder of Protocol Labs. IPFS is a distributed file system that seeks to connect all computing devices with the same system of files. The possibilities for IPFS could range from distributed cloud hosting to websites without central servers to even replacing HTTP. It’s a project as audacious as any we’ve had on the podcast and Juan did an outstanding job explaining the technology and vision.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/100
One of the key innovations of Bitcoin is the ability to easily implement payment channels. A number of use cases have been discussed or demonstrated, among which is the idea of pay-per-use. This is particularly useful when charging for things like WiFi or streaming video by the second. With this in mind, one could imagine a line of communication between two peers, where data flows in one direction and payments flow in the other.
This is the idea behind Streamium, a free and open-source service which allows content creators to stream live video directly to viewers, and get paid instantly. We’re joined by Manuel Aráoz and , the two brilliant software engineers from Argentina who created Streamium. They have worked together on numerous Bitcoin projects these past few years, including ProofOfExistence.com, Faradam, Decentraland, RelayStore, and actively contributed to the BitCore javascript library.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/099
When invented the concept of prediction markets almost thirty years ago, he felt he had stumbled on a concept with huge implications. By allowing people to bet on the likelihood of future events, prediction markets promise to allow better forecasts and better decision making.
Research into the area has been vibrant, culminating in Hanson’s concept of Futarchy: A prediction-market based governance system. At the same time, the real-world applications have been few and far.
Hanson, an associate professor of economics at George Mason University, joined us to discuss his invention, futarchy and the challenges of disruptive technology.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/098
Prediction markets are considered one of the most promising applications of blockchain technology. Although the concept and some early implementations have existed for years, decentralized prediction markets present a number of advantages to their centralized counterparts.
joins us to discuss Truthcoin, a “Peer-to-Peer Oracle Protocol which absorbs accurate data into a blockchain so that Bitcoin-users can speculate in Prediction Markets”. We dive deep to explore the advantages of decentralized prediction markets, their various real-world applications, and their potential to revolutionize the creation and propagation of knowledge in our society.
On this episode, we are thrilled to introduce a new co-host on Epicenter Bitcoin, Meher Roy. He has a biochemical engineering background and previously worked as an adviser to HyperLedger. Since discovering Bitcoin, he spends most of his free time understanding blockchain technology and its potential impact on our lives. We’re confident that Meher will bring a high level of understanding and critical thinking to the topics we cover, and we’re certain our listeners will be as happy as we are to have him on the show.
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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/097
It is often said that technology is neutral. It’s certainly commonplace for Bitcoin to be thought of as such. In reality, technologies may be characterized as an embodiment of human intention, and therefore, cannot be considered as culturally or politically neutral. At least, this is the opinion of our guest, . A research scientist at MIT Media Lab and CEO of ID3, a nonprofit which aims to deploy a new generation of trusted digital institutions, John has spent the last seven decades researching the interaction between technology and society.
He joins us for a fascinating discussion on the flaws of our institutions in present day society and how we can leverage technology to build a new social ecosystem.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/096
As the debate about forks, the blocksize and decision making in Bitcoin continues, we are joined by Adam Back. Adam is best known for his invention hash-cash which became one of the fundamental building blocks of Bitcoin. He is also the inventor of the sidechains concept and founder and president of Blockstream, the single biggest employer of Bitcoin core developers.
With Adam we talked about the different blocksize proposals and how a decentralized cryptocurrency should be governed in general. He is an influential conservative voice in the current debate and has been warning that a rapid increase of the blocksize could undermine the decentralization of Bitcoin.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/095
As the debate about the blocksize continues to roar through the Bitcoin community, Gavin Andresen joins us to take a step back and ask the big questions: How should these decisions be made in the first place? What does the governance of Bitcoin look like now and what do we want it to look like in the future?
In a challenging time for Bitcoin, it’s a critical discussion to have with the Chief Scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation and successor of Satoshi. We cover everything from the current blocksize debate to the nature of forks to how decisions will be made in Bitcoin XT.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/094
Ever since the financial system collapsed in 2007, the call for alternatives has grown louder. Bitcoin itself can be seen as such an alternative. Simon Dixon’s search for a way to put capitalism on a sounder financial footing began before Bitcoin with a focus on equity crowdfunding. Since then he has built Bank to the Future into an innovative crowdfunding business that takes an aggressive contrarian stance. He has also launched an investment fund focused on cryptocurrencies together with Max Keiser called Bitcoin Capital.
He joined us for a fascinating discussion about the flaws of the banking system, Bitcoin and the search for alternatives.
Note:
Our sponsor Vaultoro is raising an equity crowdfunding round on Bank to the Future. Read about the details and invest here:
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/093
In a long-overdue episode, we finally had the chance to dive into one of the most known but poorly understood cryptocurrency/blockchain project: Ripple. Reviled by many in the Bitcoin space, we put aside any prejudices and sat down for a fascinating conversation with Ripple Labs CTO Stefan Thomas.
We talked about his early days in the Bitcoin space, how Ripple came about, what the Ripple network looks like today and how its consensus protocol works.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/092
Close to two years after the initial whitepaper, the revolutionary Ethereum network has finally launched. The decentralized smart contract platform is, without a doubt, the most exciting cryptocurrency project since Bitcoin. The versatile platform with its turing-complete scripting language aspires to power the distributed applications of the future.
Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin joined us for the second time to discuss the Frontier Launch, future plans for scalability, governance and the road ahead for the organization and the protocol.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/091
Bitcoin mining and the intricate game theory that surround it is a topic that we’ve visited many times. Difficult to grasp in its complexity, it is these dynamics that determine the security of Bitcoin in the short and in the longer term. This time we were joined by none other than Dave Hudson. He is the author of the leading mining blog hashingit.com, VP of Software at PeerNova and had a long career in chip manufacturing including at Qualcomm.
We talked about dynamics in the mining market, security issues with Bitcoin’s design and his data-informed views on the blocksize debate.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/090
Amidst all the discussion of alternative uses of blockchains, it is often forgotten that the very first fork of Bitcoin, Namecoin, pursued a daring vision for a decentralized, censorship-resistant internet. Greg Slepak, co-founder of the okTurtles Foundation joined us for an interesting discussion of DNS, Namecoin and how blockchains can be used to decentralize the internet.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/089
In this episode, we revisited the perennial topic of digital currency regulation with Siân Jones, our regulatory correspondent and founder of the regulation-focused virtual currency consultancy COINSULT. With the final version of the BitLicense, what may turn out to be the most influential document for digital currency regulation, is now out. Besides diving into many different aspects of the onerous BitLicense, we talked about California’s coming rules, how Bitcoin startups will be affected and the implications of Ripple’s fine.
NOTE: Since the episode was recorded the advocate general at the EU Court of Justice recommended that Bitcoin be exempt from VAT.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/088
Solving the pain points of online payments was the applications that garnered the most attention in Bitcoin’s early days. In recent times, as consumer adoption of Bitcoin payments has been underwhelming much of that attention has shifted elsewhere. Nevertheless, companies keep working hard on making the vision of a universal, global payment system a reality.
Among those companies, one stands out as the top contender to compete with existing payment systems: Bitnet. Funded with a heavy warchest and the company is ran by veterans of Visa and Cybersource, a company started in 1994 to help merchants accept credit cards online that was sold to Visa in 2007 for $2bn. They have been working behind the scenes to get Bitcoin to break through with merchants.
CEO John McDonnell joined us for an important discussion of how online payments work today, why they are broken and how Bitcoin will revolutionize the industry.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/087
Peter Thiel argued in his book ‘Zero to One’ that the way to build a great and highly profitable company is to build a monopoly. But with decentralized technologies, there is a real question whether these monopolies can be built or whether the monopolies will end up being publicly owned goods (like Bitcoin) that can’t be monetized directly.
William Mougayar, who is an experienced tech executive and angel investor, has been writing extensively about these issues and was one of the investors in OB1, the venture-backed company launched by the founders of the decentralized market place Open Bazaar. He joined us for a discussion of the cryptocurrency space, Ethereum, Open Bazaar and monetizing decentralized technologies.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/086
Revolutionary progress doesn’t happen without lots of work and in the case of Bitcoin that requires many different startups building technology. Few have contributed to this as much as Silicon Valley based startup accelerator Boost VC, which has been focusing on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency startups since 2013. Focusing exclusively on Bitcoin for an extended time, they’ve invested in companies such as Blockcypher, Coinprism, Coinjar, Mirror, Snapcard, Zapchain and many others.
Boost VC Founder Adam Draper joined us to discuss running an accelerator, their investment thesis and why they’ve chosen to add Virtual / Augmented Reality startups to the program.
NOTE: Applications to join the next tribe of Boost startups can be submitted until Wednesday July 1. If you’re interested in applying go here:
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/085
One topic that is guaranteed to cause heated discussion among cryptocurrency enthusiasts is the idea that blockchains can be controlled by known validators and function without an underlying cryptocurrency. Some think this is a non-sensical idea fabricated by those spineless enough to want to appease regulators and but clueless enough to miss the whole point of cryptocurrencies. But others believe that Bitcoin is unsuited for a lof of ‘Bitcoin 2.0’ applications and that permissioned ledgers have wide-reaching potential to increase efficiency and transparency.
Tim Swanson joined us for an important discussion of permissioned ledgers. He’s among their best-known proponents and has recently published a whitepaper discussing how they work and looking at different startups in the space.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/084
Many people think of Bitcoin as the ultimate contender against the power of central banks, most importantly the Federal Reserve System. But that is certainly not the only way that cryptocurrencies and the blockchain can be used and one particularly interesting idea is that central banks could issue their own cryptocurrencies.
To discuss how this could be done and what the consequences could be we were joined by David Andolfatto, a Vice President of Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and a professor of Economics at Simon Fraser University.
The views and opinions expressed by ou guest are his own and should in no way be attributed to his employer.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/083
Whether the block size should be increased to 20MB has created more controversy than any other question in Bitcoin’s recent history. For some, it is an urgent and necessary step in Bitcoin’s evolution. Their view is that leaving the block size at 1MB would be irresponsible inaction with potentially catastrophic consequences. Others see increasing the block size as unnecessary and a dangerous first step down a slippery slope towards a more centralized Bitcoin.
We were joined by Mike Hearn, along with Gavin Andresen the most outspoken supporter of a block size increase. He is also the creator of Bitcoin XT, a modified fork of Bitcoin Core, that may become the vehicle for the push for bigger blocks if no agreement is reached regarding Bitcoin Core. Don’t miss this crucial conversation!
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/082
From the mysterious creation story, to the early development among a small group of cypherpunks, to the emergence of the Silk Road, the collapse of MtGox, to the entry of a tidal wave of VC money and the Silicon Valley elite, Bitcoin’s short history has been action-packed. It’s no surprise that this could make for a riveting story and NY Times journalist Nathaniel Popper’s book ‘Digital Gold – Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money’ is precisely that.
Popper joined us for a conversation about his must-read book about the remarkable story of Bitcoin.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/081
Since Gavin Andresen’s proposal to increase the Bitcoin block size, how Bitcoin can scale to accommodate higher transaction volumes has been heatedly debated among developers. One of the most promising long-term options to allow near infinite scalability is the Lightning Network. Joseph Poon and , the co-authors of the whitepaper, joined us for a discussion of scalability and how the lightning network could allow massive numbers of off-chain transaction in a trustless way.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/080
Started in May 2013, Coinkite has by now almost advanced to senior citizen status in the short-lived Bitcoin startup space. CEO Rodolfo Novak joined us for a discussion about what drove their initial interest in Bitcoin, why they initially focused on providing ‘bank-like’ services and how they’ve transitioned to powering the infrastructure of countless Bitcoin startups with their API. We also discussed multi-sig and the business strategy they pursued that allowed them to be profitable and not require venture funding.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/079
The idea of using the Bitcoin blockchain to represent and track the ownership of off-chain assets is almost as old as Bitcoin itself. One of the startups that is pursuing this vision is Berlin-based Ascribe, which allows creators to register (‘ascribe’), transfer and archive digital art.
Ascribe CTO joined us for a fascinating discussion of their ambitious goals to enable a so-far elusive secondary market for digital art, help creators monetize their work and ultimately retrofit an entire ownership layer to the internet.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/078
Few question that educating people about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies is one of the most important and challenging tasks to achieve mass adoption. And perhaps even fewer disagree that there is no one more gifted at communicating the revolutionary potential of Bitcoin than Andreas M. Antonopoulos. A technologist, entrepreneur, LTB host and author, he has been speaking, writing and educating about Bitcoin for years and become one of the most popular people in the Bitcoin space.
He joined us to talk about his new book, his journey in the Bitcoin space, educating lawmakers about Bitcoin and the exciting future awaiting us.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/077
Bitcoin’s approach to solving the double spending problem is to make a collusion and attack on the network prohibitively expensive. One of the main factors that will determine Bitcoin’s chance of survival in the long-term is whether the behavior that maximizes the profits of miners contributes to or sabotages the health of the network.
The game theory that determines this is complex and our understanding of it still incomplete. But research is increasing and two people who have been at the forefront of this work are , a professor in computer science at Cornell University, and Ittay Eyal, a post-doc at the same department.
They joined us for a fascinating discussion of their work on ‘selfish mining’, the incetive structure that underlies Bitcoin and their recent positive conclusions from the Miner’s Dilemma.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/076
As the cost of computing continues to plummet, the number of connected devices is increasing dramatically. In the future powerful computing capacity will be in billions of devices ranging from the lightbulb to the car door to new wearables. This new internet of things (IoT) will dramatically change our lives.
Paul Brody, a Technology Strategist and the former VP of Mobile and IoT at IBM, joined us for a discussion of where the IoT is going. We discussed their white paper on why a decentralized, blockchain-based internet of things could solve the problems of the current IoT in terms of privacy, scalability, and business models.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/075
The cryptocurrency ecosystem is increasingly divided into different camps. There are those betting and working on the eventual mainstream success of Bitcoin. And there are those who take elements of Bitcoin’s technology and repurpose them to improve existing systems.
Hyperledger is one of the projects firmly in the latter camp. They are envisioning a world where innumerable interoperable ledgers are operated by different parties. Hyperledger is their tool for the creation and management of these ledgers. CEO Dan O’Prey and CTO joined us for a discussion of the project, underlying technology and their view of where the cryptocurrency ecosystem is going.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/073
When one is busy driving a technological and societal revolution forward, complying with complicated regulatory requirements is rarely a top priority. Yet, the reality is that at this stage the often ambigious and rapidly evolving regulatory landscape can have an outsized impact on the fate of cryptocurrency startups and on the adoption/integration into existing systems.
Epicenter Bitcoin Regulatory Correspondent and founder of COINsult Siân Jones joined us for an update on the state of Bitcoin regulation in a variety of jurisdiction.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/072
Creating a new token and selling it to fund the development of software has become a preferred way of fundraising for cryptocurrency entrepreneurs. It’s a tempting tool, allowing startups to avoid traditional investors, build a community and allow anyone anywhere to own a stake in the project. For participants, there is the promise of big financial upside and being part of novel undertakings.
Lisa Cheng, whose consulting firm Vanbex has accompanied many crowdsales, joined us for a discussion of this revolutionary way to fund and monetize open source software.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/071
When spinning up a few hundred data-gathering Bitcoin nodes prevented some breadwallet users from transmitting bitcoin transaction, a minor panic quickly erupted about the Bitcoin compliance startup Chainalysis and their supposed sybil attack on the Bitcoin network.
Chainalysis CEO Michael Gronager joined us for a discussion of what happened and what role transaction monitoring will play in the future. We dove deep into the tension between the desires for user privacy and the requirements to achieve integration into existing financial services.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/070
Powering an estimated 5-10% of all Bitcoin transactions, Electrum is one of the leaders of the Bitcoin wallet space. The open-source walled was started in 2011 and played a key role in the development of the light-weight SPV wallets. Developer Thomas Voegtlin joined us for a discussion of Electrum, their recent 2.0 release and the rapidly evolving Bitcoin wallet space in general.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/069
Is Bitcoin secure from attacks that could destroy the currency? To a large part, this is determined by how expensive it is to carry out an attack and by the potential profits the attacker could generate. Ideally, an attack is so expensive to carry out that no profit-driven attacker would engage in it.
But in this episode, Brian argues that the cost of attacking Bitcoin will likely decrease in the future and the ability to short Bitcoin and thus benefit from an attack will increase dramatically.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/068
What Bitcoin did for money, OpenBazaar is trying to achieve for commerce. Born as a fork of the Dark Market project, OpenBazaar aims to facilitate online trade by removing unneeded middlemen. Built as an open source protocol, users simply install the application on their computer to gain access to marketplaces available on the network. From the app, they may also place items or services for sale by creating “Ricardian contracts”, which get propagated to the network and made accessible to everyone to see. The protocol, which uses Bitcoin as a means of payments, utilises multi-signature transactions. This makes it possible for transacting parties to include third-party arbitrators, who may intervene in the event of a dispute. We talked to Brian Hoffman, the project’s Lead Developer, about this paradigm-shifting project and the potential it has to disrupt person-to-person marketplaces such as eBay. Currently in beta, OpenBazaar is due for a full release in Q1-Q2 of 2015.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/067
Levin Keller is known to many in Berlin as the man who warned everyone about the dark scenario where buying Bitcoins in Europe would be subject to VAT. As with the VAT issue, Levin was also concerned with the complexity of filing tax returns. For merchants and companies dealing in Bitcoin, keeping track of gains and losses makes proper accounting a messy ordeal.
His startup, Coyno, hopes to solve that by providing standalone, read-only bookkeeping for your existing wallets. Coyno allows you to import the public seed from your HD wallet and keeps track of transactions. The service, currently in beta, reads your wallets’ public addresses and stores bookkeeping information whenever a transaction occurs. By recording the exchange rate at the time of transaction, Coyno can generate reports of taxable events, allowing users to more easily file their taxes. By allowing Coyno to read all your wallets, it’s able to differentiate incoming and outgoing transaction from funds being moved within your organization, a feature lacking from other reporting tools.
Levin also talks about his journey of being incubated at the Axel Springer Plug and Play Accelerator in Berlin. He also weighs in on some of the challenges of building a Bitcoin startup and attracting investors in Europe.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/066
Backbone to the financial system? Powering decentralized technology? The first true world currency? There is probably who hasn’t dreamt of a world ten years from now when Bitcoin would be all those things. The promise of cryptocurrencies are enormous, but will Bitcoin really emerge as the winner? And how can we reconcile this grand vision for Bitcoin with an ecosystem where projects launch new coins and blockchains every day?
The one project that rekindles those Bitcoin dreams and paints a potential path to Bitcoin’s ultimate success are sidechains. Developed by Adam Back, Greg Maxwell and several other Bitcoin core developers, sidechains aims to allow the permissionless, rapid innovation of alt chains, but using the established monetary base and network of Bitcoin.
It’s a complex project, but with Blockstream founders and sidechains visionaries Adam Back and Greg Maxwell we couldn’t have had better companions on our journey into understanding the coming Bitcoin-Sidechains-Macrocosm.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/065
Adam B. Levine, the “Spiritual Grandfather” of Epicenter Bitcoin and Editor-in-Chief of Let’s Talk Bitcoin, joins us to share is “crazy” passion for information and cryptocurrency. Never shy when it comes to talking about complicated subjects, Adam divulges his ideas about the next iteration of the experimental Let’s Talk Bitcoin Network and his newly launched standalone token vending machine, SwapBot. Adam also opens up about his role as the Chief Visionary Officer of CoinPowers and why it ultimately failed as a project. We also get Adam’s take on the future of crowdfunding and what role he sees himself playing within the crypto community moving forward.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/064
When it comes to Bitcoin, Tim Swanson is known to many as the man who sees the glass half empty. Whether or not that’s true, it’s fair to say that Tim has critical opinions about Bitcoin and questions many of the assumptions held by those who wish to see it succeed. A researcher and educator, he is the author of several books including “Great Wall of Numbers: Business Opportunities and Challenges in China” and “Great Chain of Numbers: A Guide to Smart Contracts, Smart Property and Trustless Asset Management”. He also blogs about Bitcoin, economics and various other topics at OfNumbers.com. He currently serves as an advisor to Hyperledger and is Head of Business Development at Melotic.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/063
Eris Industries spawned when three people got together to come up with a solution to Olivier Janssens’ £100K bounty to replace the Bitcoin Foundation with software. Their proposal, initially called Project Douglas and built on top of Ethereum, was designed to replicate the functions of a trade association on a blockchain. Today, Eris has evolved into a Distributed Application Software Stack, with which developers can rapidly deploy distributed applications that are flexible, legally compliant and secure. Interestingly, Eris allows organisations and companies to adopt blockchain technology without being fully decentralised.
We’re joined by one of the Founders and COO of Eris Industries, Preston Byrne, who explains how Eris works and talks about some of the practical use cases which may arise. Siân Jones is also here to weigh in on some of the innovative aspects of this exciting open-source project.
Episode links:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/062
Every quarter, CoinDesk releases its excellent State of Bitcoin Report proving an accurate benchmark of where the Bitcoin ecosystem stands. We were very fortunate to be joined by the man who compiles the State of Bitcoin Report, Garrick Hileman. As an economic historian at the London School of Economics and a frequent contributor to CoinDesk, Garrick is best know as an expert on Bitcoin and other currencies.
We would like to pay our respects to the 17 innocent people who lost their lives in the recent terror attacks in Paris. Our thoughts are with their families and loved ones. Je suis Charlie!
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/061
That the bitcoin price is highly volatile is no secret. Opinions differ on whether that is just an inevitable roadblock to be passed on the way to world domination or whether it represents a fundamental flaw that will prevent Bitcoin from ever achieving widespread use as a medium-of-exchange. Seasoned hedge fund trader and monetary systems expert Robert Sams, is of the latter view and has been among the leaders in conceptualizing what a stable cryptocurrency should look like. It’s an issue that is at the very heart of how the cryptocurrency ecosystem will develop.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/060
As we wrap up 2014, Brian and Sebastien have a fireside chat and look back on some of the areas of Bitcoin they thought were the most defining. They also look out to 2015 and give their thoughts about what to expect in the coming year. This episode also marks the show’s 1-year anniversary, so celebratory drinks are in order. No guests or scripts for this one, just a candid conversation between the Epicenter Bitcoin founders.
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/059
At just 20-years young, Vitalik Buterin is one of the most brilliant minds in the cryptocurrency space. Previously, a co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine, he has conceptualized Ethereum, the most radical and ambitious cryptocurrency project since Bitcoin. After raising $18m in a crowdsale, a team of over 30 are working on launching the project by March 2015. In his work on designing a system for the future, he has been grappling with many of the hardest problems in the cryptocurrency space over the past year.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/058
CoinTelegraph Chief Editor, Allen Scott, and writer, Ian DeMartino join Sebastien (Brian is away) for a conversation about the independent Bitcoin media. Cryptocurrencies enable new business models and monetization opportunities for content producers, which CT is fully utilizing. Allen and Ian explain their innovative system whereby content creators are paid according to the success of their articles, which it determines by measuring the number of shares on social media. CoinTelegraph is an independent news site that specializes in Bitcoin and digital currencies. Freelance writers, who all get paid in Bitcoin, produce the vast majority of their content. CT’s long-term ambition is to grow along with Bitcoin and become a front runner in the cryptocurrency news space.
Episode links:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/057
We are joined by Daniel Krawisz, the Director of Research at the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute. Daniel co-founded that organization last year with Michael Goldstein and Pierre Rochard to educate the Bitcoin community on the foundational ideas that led to the creation of Bitcoin. The Satoshi Nakomoto Institute is dedicated to shedding light on the ideological history of Bitcoin and keeping its controversial roots from being marginalized.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/056
SolidX Partners CEO Daniel Gallancy joined us for a discussion of Bitcoin, institutional investors and how his company is working on creating a bridge between the two. While there is no question that interest in cryptocurrencies has risen dramatically – also among the financial elite, there is still a big chasm separating the two worlds. With Daniel we explore how it could be bridged, when it will happen and what the consequences could be.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/055
Daniel Peled, CEO of Gems, and Tom Kysar, Marketing Lead at Koinify, join us to talk about a project that aims to revolutionize social messaging.
As one of the first decentralized social networks built on blockchain technology, Gems hopes to put the ownership of the network back in the hands of its users. While large centralized social networks collect your information and sell it to advertisers, Gems is building on a different model in which users only receive solicited messages and get paid when companies advertise to them. Gems is also a cryptocurrency which can be traded between users within its mobile app. The initial crowdsale, organized by Koinify, will run from December 1st to January 5th.
Episode links:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/054
Keeping Bitcoins safe from theft is probably one of the things Bitcoin holders worry the most about. Historically, there have been a number of recommended best practices like paper wallets, BIP 38 wallet cards and cold storage. Although these remain relatively safe ways to store Bitcoins, implementing these solutions can be complicated and difficult to manage for day-to-day transactions. Recently, some companies have begun introducing multi-signature HD wallet services, where 2-out-of-3 signatures are required to sign transactions. These solutions offer security and usability, with the assurance that Bitcoins will remain safe, and the ability to transact with ease. In fact, the website P2SH.info tracks the adoption of multi-sig, and it has been growing exponentially in recent months.
Which brings us to our guest: Arianna Simpson, an Account Specialist at BitGo, a company that provides a simple multi-signature HD wallet solution for individuals and businesses. We talked to Arianna about BitGo and the services they offer, discuss different use cases for multi-sig HD wallets and make projections about the evolution of the wallet space from different angles.
Episode links:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/053
Today’s episode is all about Factom, an open source project which aims to solve three core problems which apply to all Bitcoin 2.0 applications: Speed, Cost, and Bloat. Rather than writing every transaction to the blockchain, Factom allows decentralized applications to write blocks of transactions to Factom blocks, which themselves get hashed and stored to the bitcoin blockchain. At its core, Factom provides Proof of Existance, which allows for any digital artifact to be reduced to a hash that proves that artifact’s existance at a specific point in time.
We are joined by Factom CEO, Paul Snow, and President, Peter Kirby, to explore the different applications of Factom as well as the technical workings of this very interesting and promissing project.
Episode links:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/052
David A. Johnston is a very active member of the Bitcoin community. Aside from speaking at about every Bitcoin conference there is, David is the Managing Director of the DApps Fund, a board member MSC Protocol Foundation, as well as Co-founder and Executive Director of the BitAngels Network.
On this episode we go deep in to decentralized applications, and who better to talk to about DApps than the creator of “Johnston’s Law” which states “Everything that can be decentralized, will be decentralized”. We talked to David about the recent whitepaper he co-wrote titled “The General Theory of Decentralized Applications, DApps” which defines the different types of DApps and a number of best practices with regards to funding, token distribution, business models, etc. We also discussed the DApps Fund, BitAngels Network and the Master Protocol, and his involvement with those projects.
Episode links:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/051
Nicolas Courtois is a cryptographer and senior lecturer at University College London. He has been studying cryptocurrencies for some time and has written a number of papers on bitcoin. His talk is titled “Cryptographic Security of ECDSA in bitcoin” in which he exposes the security vulnerabilities in the specific variation of the Elliptic Curve digital Signature Algorithm used in bitcoin.
Episode links:
This episode is hosted by Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/050
Meni Rosenfeld is Founder of Bitcoil and Chairman of the Israeli Bitcoin Association. Having organized several meetups and conferences in Israel, he is a very active member of the Israeli Bitcoin community. Meni has been studying mining pool reward methods for several years and in 2011, wrote a paper titled “Analysis of Bitcoin Pooled Mining Reward Systems”. This research gave him a broad understanding the reward system landscape and the issues with many of the methods used by pools. He later wrote proposals for alternative non pay-per-share methods and which would render pool hopping impossible: the geometric method and double geometric method.
Episode links:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/049
BTC2B Brussels conference on October 16 & 17, 2014
This episode features two parts of a session on Bitcoin marketing. First, Richard Caetano, founder of Handshake and btcReport, talks about the importance of sharing stories to create user engagement. Then, you’ll hear a panel discussion moderated by Richard with Jeremy Garder, Executive Directory of the College Cryptocurrency Network, and Sebastien Couture, as panelists. They talk about how the Bitcoin industry can grow adoption though integrated product & marketing strategies.
This episode is hosted by Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/048
The College Cryptocurrency Network is a non-profit organization which aims to provide students, academics, and faculty with the guidance and resources required to start independent Bitcoin clubs on college campuses and in schools. Since being founded in early 2014, the CCN has grown to well over 100 chapters, on every continent, from middle schools to PhD programs.
Director of Student Outreach, Jacob Sears, and Creative Director, Dean Masley, join us to talk about the CCN’s work and their personal experiences with starting clubs in their respective universities. We also talked about how the concept of Bitcoin is received by students and the potential for blockchain innovation and adoption on university campuses.
Episode links:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/047
Shawn Wilkinson, founder and lead developer of Storj, joins us for our first deep dive into a decentralized application. Storj’s particular domain is the decentralization of cloud storage. Their applications allow users to store their files in a decentralized peer-to-peer network that promises to be more secure and effective. At the same time, it creates a market where people can earn money by renting out spare hard disk space.
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Episode links:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/046
Every quarter CoinDesk puts out its excellent State of Bitcoin Report providing a snapshot of where the Bitcoin ecosystem is at. We took this opportunity to go back to our original formation and have a discuss of the report and the state of Bitcoin in general. It was lots of fun!
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/045
Mehdi Medjaoui (Co-founder and COO) & Elie Chevignard (CMO) are the two guys behind Oauth.io, a service which aims to provide a simple and standardized way for developers to implement Oath. Working in digital identity management, they have an interesting proposal on how to build personal identity management into the blockchain. This proposition would effectively take the power away from centralized single sign on services like Facebook and Google and make them decentralized.
Episode links:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/044
The Isle of Man has been an area of interest for many Bitcoin companies as of late. The local government of this small British Crown Dependency, located in the middle of the Irish Sea, wants to attract Bitcoin businesses by adopting light regulation as well as providing accessible banking relationships and infrastructure for companies dealing in crypto. This business-friendly approach has made the island an ideal place for tech, aerospace and e-gaming companies to establish, which has been a great benefit for the local economy in the last few decades. As an example, the leading online gaming site Poker Stars now employs some 200 people on the island.
With the support of the Economic Development Department, the Isle of Man recently hosted Crypto Valley Summit to help promote their wiliness to work with Bitcoin companies. Siân Jones was at the event and captures this enthusiasm in three interviews, which we discuss on the show:
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/043
Tom Ding is the CEO and Founder of Koinify, a platform for funding decentralized applications. Think of Koinify as a sort of Angel List to bootstrap and fund a new decentralized economy, specifically decentralized applications. With his company, Tom hopes to help build the decentralized app which help push this technology to the mainstream. With his extensive knowledge of this space, we talked about the future of DACs and DAPPs and discussed some of the challenges these new models are facing, from profitability to the obvious legal aspects.
This episode was recorded over a live Google Hangout. It was our first attempt at doing a live video show and unfortunately we didn’t get the recording right. Our apologies for the bad sound quality, we’ll get the next one right.
Episode links:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/042
Siân Jones was recently in London for the Inside Bitcoins conference. She interviewed two people with extensive knowledge of regulation and how it should apply to Bitcoin.
Marco Santori is Chairman of the regulatory affairs committee of the Bitcoin Foundation and recently appointed Global policy council of for Blockchain. As the New York Department of Financial Services BitLicense proposal nears the end of it’s second 45-day challenge period, Mr. Santori gives his predictions on what the legislation will look like when it is passed, which he expects to happen by the end of this year.
Amor Sexton is a lawyer at Adroit in Sydney Australia, a commercial law firm that specializes in Bitcoin and actively represents the Bitcoin industry when hen liaising with the Australian government. In her talk with Siân, she spoke about the Australian government’s recent guidance and draft ruling on the tax treatment of crypto currencies, with regards to income tax, capital gains tax and GST. They point out how these draft rulings differ from those proposed in other jurisdictions and explore how they will affect merchants and Bitcoin holders in the future.
Episode links:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/041
La maison du Bitcoin is a dedicated Bitcoin center located in the heart of ”Silicon Sentier”, which is situated in the 2nd arrondissement of Paris. Founded by entrepreneurs Eric Larchevêque and Thomas France, La maison du Bitcoin is an open space where people are encouraged to walk in and get information about Bitcoin. It also offers a variety of services such as a co-working space for bitcoiners and the ability to purchase Bitcoin over the counter. It’s also the home to meetups, conferences and training seminars.
For 10% off the upcoming Euro Bitcoin conference happening on October 8 in Paris, go to EuroBitcoin.org and use the code EPICENTER.
Episode links:
This episode is hosted by Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/040
Dr. Bastian Brand is an investment manager at Pathfinder Capital. Pathfinder Capital is a London-based Venture Capital firm that focuses on frontier markets and cryptocurrencies. He is also the founder of the Bitcoin Startups Munich group and was previously a consultant at McKinsey.
The episode focused on his comprehensive paper surveying the investment landscape in the cryptocurrency space. We discussed the advantages of buying bitcoins versus investing in cryptocurrency startups, the prospect of Bitcoin 2.0 projects, and his views on the different sectors of the Bitcoin industry.
Episode links:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/039
Flavien Charlon is the founder of coloured coin wallet Coinprism. Colored coins allow people and organizations to securely issue and trade real-world assets like commodities, stocks and bonds on the bitcoin network. Coinprism recently won the global Startup Challenge hosted by the Bitcoin Foundation in May 2014. Other notable projects include Predictious, a Bitcoin-based prediction market. He has 8 years of experience in software engineering at Microsoft, building large scale distributed systems, and is a graduate of Ecole Centrale Lyon, where he received an Msc. in Engineering.
For 10% off Inside Bitcoins London on September 15 and 16, use the discount code EPICIBC14
Episode links:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/038
Thomas Spaas, director of the Belgian Bitcoin Association and an international tax lawyer in Antwerp, and our regulatory affairs correspondent Siân Jones, join us to discuss a Swedish court case on VAT, the European Value Added Tax. The case has made it all the way to the Court of Justice of the European Union and may set the precedent for how the sale of Bitcoin will be taxed.
For 10% off Inside Bitcoins London on September 15 and 16, use the discount code EPICIBC14
Register for Inside Bitcoins London
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/037
Today’s panel discussion is called “The ever changing landscape of Bitcoin mining” where moderator Jez San is joined by some of the most prominent figures in the mining industry, Marc Aafjes of Bitfury, Dave Carlson of Megabigpower, Timo Hanke of Cointerra and Naveed Sherwani of Peernova. The discussion revolves around several key topics, notably, everyone seems to agree the industry should move away from the term mining and start calling it transaction processing. They also discuss the rapid evolution of ASIC processors in the last year, the importance of improving the overall power efficiency of the network and where ASIC production is heading. They also talk about a highly debated subject which is the shift from home mining to centralised data centers. The panels ends with predictions on the total hashing power of the network at the end of this year.
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/036
George Samman is co-founder and COO of the Bitcoin derivatives exchange, BTC.sx. George helps us get a broad understanding of derivatives as a financial product, and we explore their uses in the context of Bitcoin. He also brings his perspective with regards to bridging the gap between Wall Street and the Bitcoin ecosystem. As a Chartered Market Technician, he has a very technical view on market movements and gives us his thoughts on the recent BTC price fluctuations.
Episode links:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/035
This episode features a panel discussion called “Decentralized Applications and Appcoins.” Flavien Charlon, founder of Coinprism, Ron Gross of the Mastercoin Foundation and Gavin Wood of Ethereum discuss the fascinating things which are happening in the so-called Bitcoin 2.0 space. The panel starts with a short status update on each of the panellist’s respective projects. They also dig into some of the legal implications, lay out the security challenges and give their thoughts on how they feel the appcoin and DAC space will evolve in the coming years.
Episode links:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/034
Edmund Edgar is the founder of Reality Keys. His startup won the Startup Challenge award at the Bitcoin 2014 Conference in Amsterdam. They are providing cryptographic data feeds on real-life events. This can then be used to base derivatives, contracts or insurances on. There is no question that services like Reality Keys will play a key role in crypto currency’s future. Previously he was Director of Information Technology at Princeton Review Japan and he is also a graduate of Oxford University.
Read the blog post summarising this episode on Bitcoinist.net.
Episode links:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/033
CoinSummit London Conference Series – July 10 and 11, 2014
In this episode we talk to Olivier Janssens, a Bitcoin early adopter and investor, and his associate Andrew Turner. We discussed Olivier’s recent $100,000 bounty replace the Bitcoin Foundation. He told us why he chose Mike Hearn’s Lighthouse project as the winner of 40% of that bounty and the effect that Lighthouse could have on Bitcoin core development funding.
We also interviewed Michael Jackson. He’s the former COO of Skype and currently a VC at Mangrove Partners. We discussed the recent EBA opinion paper. We also talked about his experiences with the regulation of new and disruptive technologies from his days at Skype as well as investing in Bitcoin companies.
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/coinsummit-london-04
Coinapult’s CEO Ira Miller and marketing specialist Freya Stevens join us for a discussion about their company and plans for the future. We particularly dove into their new Locks feature, which allows people to ‘lock’ the value of their bitcoins to other assets such as US Dollar, Euro or gold from directly within the Coinapult wallet. The goal is to remove one often-named barrier to mainstream adoption: volatility.
We also talked about the amazing ‘Let the Bit Drop’ project, which involves sending bitcoin per SMS to every resident of a small Carribean island. A party in Q4 will launch the project and educational materials will be given to residents via government channels.
Episode links:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/032
CoinSummit London Conference Series – July 10 and 11, 2014
This episode features a panel discussion called “The challenges of operating a Bitcoin business in Europe”. Peter Smith, COO of Blockchain.info, Mark Lamb, CEO of Coinfloor and Frank Schuil CEO, of Safello provide their insights on some of the challenges of running a Bitcoin business on the old continent. These challenges include regulatory compliance, establishing banking relationships and establishing trust with consumers. The panel is moderated by Adam Vaziri of Diacle.
Episode links:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/coinsummit-london-03
Gavin Wood joins us for an episode that is all about Ethereum. The uniquely ambitious Ethereum project with its turing-complete programming language is building a platform on which the next generation of decentralized applications can be run. While the project is still in development, the goal is to provide the infrastructure for the completely decentralized web of the future. The first part of the episode features an interview of Ethereum CTO and lead developer of the C++ client Gavin Wood. In the second part of the episode, Brian discusses the crowdsale of Ethereum’s own cryptocurrency ether that is currently going on from an investment perspective.
Episode links:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/031
CoinSummit London Conference Series – July 10 and 11, 2014
Our second CoinSummit Episode is out! In it we have two fantastic interviews. In the first one we discussed transaction fees, the economics of Bitcoin and the coming relaunch of Coinometrics with Jonathan Levin. Jonathan is a co-founder of Coinometrics and just finished his Master’s thesis on Bitcoin at Oxford University.
In the second interview we talked with Peter Todd, one of the thought leaders in the Bitcoin space. We covered the economics of transactions, mining centralization and the state of Bitcoin development. Peter is a core developer and also an advisor to projects such as Mastercoin and Dark Wallet. He’s also come up with a number of important innovations such as treechains and stealth addresses.
Episode links:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/coinsummit-london-02
Radko Albrecht joins us to discuss his startup, the Bitcoin-based peer-to-peer lending platform, BitBond. We dove deeply into why Bitcoin-based peer-to-peer lending is such a compelling proposal. We also talked about a lot of the intricacies such as volatility, reputation and loans pegged to fiat currencies. The final part we discussed raising venture capital for European Bitcoin startups and how Bitcoin will change the financial industry.
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/030
CoinSummit London Conference Series – July 10 and 11, 2014
We start our coverage of CoinSummit with Garrick Hileman, CoinDesk contributor & Economic Historian at LSE, who delivers the opening “State of Bitcoin” keynote, a data-driven assessment of how the Bitcoin Ecosystem is developing. The second part of the episode features a panel discussion called Will Bitcoin Last the Distance where Jeff Garzik, Bitcoin core developer, Prof. Emin Gün Sirer, Cornell University, Peter Todd, Bitcoin a core developer discuss the issue of mining centralization. This panel is moderated by Angel Investor Jez San.
Episode links:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/coinsummit-london-01
Steven Morell and Gabriel Mirón join us to discuss the recent New York Department of Financial Services BitLicense proposal. Our regulatory affairs correspondent Siân Jones also joins us briefly to give a general overview of this proposed legislation. We also take the opportunity to talk about Bitcoin’s development in Latin America, notably as a means to disrupt the remittance market, a multi-billion dollar industry. Our guests also talk about their respective companies. Steven is Chief Product Officer at Moneero, a company based in Uruguay and which is building a full suite of Bitcoin services. Gabriel is CEO of MEXBT, a Bitcoin exchange based in Mexico.
Episode links:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/029
This episode is part of our coverage of the Bitcoin 2014 Conference which took place in Amsterdam from May 15 to 17, 2014. These interviews were conducted by Siân Jones and focus on the area of regulation.
Topics covered in this episode:
This episode is hosted by Siân Jones. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/bitcoin2014-08
The recent publication of a European Banking Authority opinion on “virtual currencies” has caused great concern among actors of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Siân Jones joins us to dissect this 46-page document and the 70+ risks it identifies. Siân also helps us better understand the EBA, its role and the extent of its influence in the European Union. We also briefly recap the Coinsummit conference which took place in London and which we attended.
Episode links:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/028
This episode is part of our coverage of the Bitcoin 2014 Conference which took place in Amsterdam from May 15 to 17, 2014. These interviews were conducted by Siân Jones and focus on the area of regulation.
Topics covered in this episode:
This episode is hosted by Siân Jones. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/bitcoin2014-07
Today we’re joined by two guests. Tatiana Moroz is a singer-songwriter, anti-war activist and a very active bitcoin enthusiast and evangelist. Recently, Tatiana created Tatiana Coin, the very first musical artist coin on the Counterparty Protocol. She also recently joined Bitcoin Magazine as their sales director and joins us from New York. Wendell Davis is also with us again from Thailand. He’s the creator of the beautiful Hive wallet and CEO of Humint, a company which aims to help companies create and deploy branded coins. Wendell is quite knowledgeable in crowd sale platforms as well as new crowdfunding models and will help us dissect some of the challenges and opportunities of creating custom coins.
Episode links:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/027
Topics covered in this episode:
Episode links:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/026
This episode is part of our coverage of the Bitcoin 2014 Conference which took place in Amsterdam from May 15 to 17, 2014.
Topics covered in this episode:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/bitcoin2014-06
Today out guest is Mike Hearn who many of you are familiar with. He’s one of the first Bitcoin users and the developer of bitcoinj, a Java library used by a number of popular Bitcoin wallets such as the Andoid wallet, Multibit and Hive. Until recently he was working at Google and is now working full-time on Bitcoin, including an interesting crowd-funding platform called Lighthouse.
Episode links:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/025
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