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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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
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