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.
Copyright: © CC BY-NC-SA
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.
Topics covered in this episode:
Episode links:
Sponsors:
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.
Topics covered in this episode:
Episode links:
Sponsors:
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.
Topics covered in this episode:
Episode links:
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.
Topics covered in this episode:
Episode links:
Sponsors:
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.
Topics covered in this episode:
Episode links:
Sponsors:
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.
Topics covered in this episode:
Episode links:
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.
Topics covered in this episode:
Episode links:
Sponsors:
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.
Topics covered in this episode:
Episode links:
Sponsors:
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.
Topics covered in this episode:
Episode links:
Sponsors:
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.
Topics covered in this episode:
Episode links:
Sponsors:
This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/325
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
