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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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
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