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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Blockchains operate as a public ledger, ‘disclosing’ the entire transaction history and associated data to everyone. While verifiability and traceability are key traits, as blockchains gain global adoption, those very features hinder the process. Self custody, on-chain identities, corporate strategies, transaction history, private deals, all represent highly sensitive information that call for provable confidentiality. Fully homomorphic encryption has long been considered the ‘holy grail’ of cryptography as it enables computation to be performed on encrypted data without the need of prior decryption. This basically translates to true end-to-end encryption, both on-chain and off-chain. As cryptographic research advances, so does the scalability and applicability of FHE. As a result of more than 5 years of work, Zama has now released Zama Protocol, which enables confidential smart contracts on top of any L1 or L2 using FHE, without any additional execution burden. By encrypting all ciphertexts with the same public key, FHE ensures composability and seamless integration across different blockchains and applications, making it a true cross-chain confidentiality layer. Through parallel execution, Zama Protocol already surpasses Ethereum’s throughput, yet future roadmap includes open-source development of FPGA & ASIC in order to scale it even further, to accommodate faster, non-EVM chains.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
Built primarily for institutional-grade clients, Pareto delivers customizable on-chain credit markets designed to expand DeFi liquidity and TradFi tokenization through structured yield strategies tailored to diverse risk profiles. Pareto allows its users to construct individualized credit lines in specific risk-ajusted tranches, with custom: interest rates, lockup periods, withdrawal cycles, reserve ratios, etc. In addition, Pareto’s USP is an yield-bearing synthetic stablecoin, fully backed by major stablecoins, that can be deployed into a diversified portfolio of liquid, short- and long-term credit, thus increasing capital efficiency.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
In an age when AI models are becoming exponentially more sophisticated and powerful, how does one ensure that proper results are being generated and that the AI model functions in desired parameters? This pressing concern of AI alignment could be solved through cryptographic verification, using zero knowledge proofs. ZKPs not only allow for verifying computation at scale, but they also confer data privacy. Lagrange’s DeepProve zkML is the fastest in existence, making it easy to prove that AI inferences are correct, scaling verifiable computation as the demand for AI grows.
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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture.
Inspired by Urbit’s minimal assembly language, Nockchain fuses Urbit’s vision of sovereign computing with a novel proof-of-useful-work consensus mechanism, creating a blockchain where every computation fuels progress and scaling. The crypto-economics behind Nockchain’s zkVM incentivise competition between zero knowledge provers, ultimately bootstrapping ZKPs as a new computational commodity.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.
Universal Market Access (UMA) was founded by 2 ex Goldman Sachs traders that wanted to make global markets universally accessible through financial smart contracts that used synthetic assets on Ethereum. However, this was taking place long before the massive boom of DeFi summer of 2020. As a result, UMA shifted to building an optimistic oracle to power prediction markets as a decentralised ‘truth machine’, thus expanding oracle use cases. Through game theoretic models, UMA managed to properly incentivise its token holders to act as voters, rewarding them for good predictions & disputes, and vice versa. Later on, Hart Lambur also co-founded Across, an intent-based optimistic bridge that set out to create a seamless UX for unifying EVM chains. Through their solver network, Across managed to achieve fast (as low as 2 seconds) and cheap bridging, abstracting away crosschain complexities, without any security tradeoffs.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
Founded in 2018, Dragonfly has quickly become one of the most prestigious crypto VCs. Dragonfly was one of the first to adopt a global approach to backing founders and disruptive tech, all while building a strong brand that allowed them to secure top-tier deals. Join us for a fascinating discussion with Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly, to learn the secrets behind running a top-tier crypto VC and what made Dragonfly succeed where others have failed.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.
‘Attention Is All You Need’, co-wrote by Illia Polosukhin in 2017, laid the foundation for arguably one of the most consequential tech breakthroughs in our recent history. 1 year later, Illia founded Near AI, which later became Near Protocol. They were visionaries ahead of their time and, although AI took several more years before becoming a viable product, the experience of scaling databases would later prove valuable and applicable in blockchain world. As a result, Near Protocol aims to become the infrastructure layer for AI apps and the agentic economy. In order to achieve this, scaling was paramount, thus Near is one of the first blockchains to implement execution layer sharding, asynchronous execution and stateless validation, which brought the finality time down to 1.2 seconds, with a block time of 0.6 seconds.
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.
The tradition of Epicenter x Vitalik Buterin continued this year as well at EthCC[8], where we got the chance of picking his brain about recent research, interests and Ethereum Foundation’s direction going forward. Join us for a fascinating discussion on biotech and how Vitalik’s Shiba ended up funding it, the utility of blockchains in nowadays society and Vitalik’s view on the Ethereum ecosystem and the Foundation’s response to community requests.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sebastien Couture.
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.
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