Raoul Pal: The Journey Man

Latest Episodes:

Tezos: Self-Amendable Ledgers and On-Chain Governance Aug 09, 2021

Show notes

Thomas Walton-Pocock, co-founder and former CEO of Aztez, sits down with Arthur Breitman, co-founder of Tezos, to discuss Tezos’ on-chain governance approach, smart contract platform, and scalability potential as well as his thoughts on the direction of decentralized finance (DeFi). Breitman breaks down the weaknesses of the forking model as a form of governance and argues that on-chain governance is the way to achieve innovation on protocols without centralization. Tezos implements this through a self-amending crypto ledger, and Breitman shares how the protocol accomplishes this through its scripting language, Michelson, for its smart contract platform, highlighting some of its benefits such as formal verification. He also shares his thoughts on scalability via a “portfolio of scaling” approach, the principles of a well-designed stablecoin, and decentralized exchanges (DEXs). Key Learnings: Breitman points out that when forks occur on a blockchain, it’s not free choice by all stakeholders on the network—on the other hand, Tezos seeks open participation when amending the protocol so that all stakeholders can help secure its network. Tezos also distinguishes itself through its use of formal verification via Michelson. Historically, formal verification has been applied in the aerospace and nuclear energy sectors, where the costs of mistakes are drastic, and Breitman states that its use in Tezos’ protocol allows for developers to rule out and avoid whole classes of bugs.

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Elrond: Building a Transparent Financial System for the Global Economy Aug 09, 2021

Show notes

Beniamin Mincu, founder and CEO of Elrond, joins Santiago Velez, co-founder and R&D division lead for Block Digital, to discuss the Elrond Network and how it’s built as well as scalability, interoperability, and future applications. When he founded Elrond, Mincu’s goals were to move away from what he calls the “dial up” version of the blockchain space and simplify the UX in order to lower the barrier to entry. To that end, Elrond aimed to build a system that could bring a 1000x improvement in throughput, execution speed, and transaction cost . This is implemented through adaptive state sharding and a secure proof of stake. Filmed April 26th, 2021. Key Learnings: Elrond tries to solve the central problem of layer 1 blockchains where there is traditionally a trade-off between security, decentralization, and scalability by looking to build a transparent financial system that can extend access to anyone anywhere. Mincu believes this is fundamentally important as the current state of the economy is low-bandwidth and high latency—any user would still have to wait for overnight transfers. Mincu views this inefficiency as a broken piece of the traditional system that cannot be simply fixed from inside. A better solution, he feels, is instead opting to create a system that can act as a complimentary asset. According to Mincu, there are still 1.7 billion people that are not connected to the current financial system and don’t have any kind of basic financial infrastructure. Giving these people a chance to participate would increase the entire effectiveness of the system significantly for the world.

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