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Web3 Community-Building and Advocacy Through the Polkadot Ambassador Program Nov 19, 2020

Show notes

Polkadot and Web3 take center stage in this week's episode. Joe Petrowski (Research Analyst, Parity Technologies) speaks with Zoé Meckbach, a senior Polkadot ambassador and blockchain technology and cybersecurity advocate. They discuss the Polkadot and Web3 communities, the Polkadot ambassador program and what it’s like to be an ambassador, and some of the exciting things happening in the space.

Links:
Zoé Meckback on Twitter
Polkadot Ambassador Program

Highlights:
02:03 - From Google to blockchain
09:20 - What is the Polkadot Ambassador Program?
20:15 - Exciting developments in the Polkadot ecosystem
26:10 - Web3 and freedom of speech

Special Guest: Zoé Meckbach.

Freedom of the Press in the Age of Digital Surveillance Oct 29, 2020

Show notes

This week we look at the intersection between journalism, freedom of the press, and technology. Joe Petrowski (Research Analyst, Parity Technologies) speaks with Harlo Holmes, Director of Digital Security at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. They discuss the role of journalism in a free society, the contemporary media landscape, the Snowden revelations, surveillance, the role of technology and privacy, the political implications of technology development, and best practices for whistleblowers.

Links:
Freedom of the Press Foundation Website
Freedom of the Press Foundation Twitter
Press Freedom Tracker

Highlights:
0:40 - Intro to Holmes and FPF
03:30 - Edward Snowden’s impact
09:08 - Journalism’s role in a free society
11:43 - The change in media today
16:31 - Technology’s role in journalism
19:27 - How to use technology without being exploited
23:27 - The influence that programmers have
29:42 - Blockchain experiments
34:42 - Best practices for whistleblowers

Key Quotes:

“Journalism’s role in society is as old as the printing press itself…. People have the right to know what’s going on. You can’t make informed decisions if you don’t know what’s going on.”

“Certain media sources are more skewed towards obfuscating rather than illuminating, and there has always been a challenge for individuals to find news sources that they can trust.”

“Historians will look at the rise of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter as a turning point in the way that the media has had to reevaluate its reach, reevaluate its funding model, and reevaluate how it presents itself to the public at large in order to secure its reach. This is quite a shift in the material of media itself.”

“People don’t necessarily realize that because the more digital aspects of our engagement are incredibly easy to parse, that opens us up to being entirely surveilled very easily and automatically”

“You have a profile, everybody is profiled based off their patterns of behavior on the internet however they interact with it, and you pretty much don’t live a day in your existence without interacting and without contributing to this profile.”

Special Guest: Harlo Holmes.

Running Node Infrastructure Easier with Bison Trails Oct 08, 2020

Show notes

This week we look at proof-of-stake blockchain node infrastructure with the space’s leading solutions provider, Bison Trails. Joe Petrowski (Research Analyst, Parity Technologies) speaks with Aaron Henshaw, CTO and cofounder of Bison Trails, which pioneers blockchain node infrastructure and lowers the barrier to entry across multiple networks, including Polkadot, Cosmos, Eth 2.0, Near, Celo, and more. They discuss how and why Bison Trails was founded, the current state of node infrastructure, risk management, and possibilities for future development.

Links:
Bison Trails Website
Bison Trails on Twitter
Aaron Henshaw on Twitter

Highlights:
02:14 - How Bison Trails came to focus on proof of stake
06:12 - Bison Trails background
08:22 - Node infrastructure setup
10:12 - Similarities/differences between protocols
12:06 - Monitoring, alerting, and availability guarantees
16:36 - Node infrastructure risk and mitigation
22:44 - Blockchain infrastructure beyond staking
28:37 - Future opportunities for node providers

Special Guest: Aaron Henshaw.

Polkadot-Ethereum Compatibility with Moonbeam Sep 23, 2020

Show notes

This week we dive into cross-network compatibility and interoperability between Polkadot and Ethereum. Joe Petrowski (Research Analyst, Parity Technologies) speaks with Derek Yoo of Moonbeam, an Ethereum-compatible smart contract parachain built on Substrate for Polkadot. They discuss Moonbeam and how it works, the role of smart contracts on Polkadot, the difference between Moonbeam and Ethereum layer-2 solutions, and the future of cross-network interoperability.

Links:
Derek Yoo: https://twitter.com/derekyoo
Moonbeam: https://twitter.com/MoonbeamNetwork
Purestake: https://twitter.com/purestakeco

Highlights:
06:27 - What is Moonbeam?
08:15 - Why Moonbeam is more than just an EVM implementation
12:16 - The difference between Moonbeam and an Ethereum-Polkadot bridge
15:40 - How parachain solutions compare to Ethereum layer-2 solutions
18:17 - The role of smart contracts on Polkadot
20:36 - Where the EVM fits in to Polkadot
24:44 - Motivation for also deploying Moonbeam to Kusama
30:05 - How different networks will work together
33:22 - Current state of applications on Moonbeam

Key Quotes:
“The power of Substrate is definitely the magic here. I think people don’t appreciate how powerful a framework on Substrate is. We’ve worked with some teams that are building a blockchain from scratch, and that’s a 20-30 person engineering effort….It’s a dramatic difference when you use a framework like Substrate.”

“Part of our attraction to Polkadot is this ability for different chains to leverage each other’s specialized services.”

“[Kusama] is a pretty key competitive advantage to Substrate-based projects. This ability to move, maintain momentum and respond to what’s happening….You can have larger competitors but if you’re able to move faster and respond faster you can get a big competitive advantage.”

“[Interoperability] is more in changing people's minds than it being a technical problem. You’re always going to get a bit of tribalism at play in this space…but we’re drawn to the interoperability idea because it opens choices for developers to take advantage of the best that any given chain has to offer.”

Special Guest: Derek Yoo.

The Challenges of Disrupting the System with Blockchain Jul 13, 2020

Show notes

This week we talk to the Parity's head of security Kirill Pimenov about the shortcomings and potential of blockchain, open-source software and DLT.

Joe Petrowski (Research Analyst, Parity Technologies) speaks with Kirill Pimenov, head of security at Parity Technologies. The disruptive nature of blockchain has attracted many great minds from many backgrounds, and Kirill Pimenov's wealth of experience and knowledge clears up some of the hype and promises of blockchain regarding its relationship to power, raising capital, and freedom.

Links:

The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work - Phillip Rogaway

Banana Split - Shamir Secret Sharing for people with friends

Highlights:

01:40 - Mining a Bitcoin block in 2010

03:02 - The ethics of open source

04:15 - Kirill's introduction to programming

10:05 - Blockchain as the field where money meets engineering

13:25 - The Silicon Valley version of the American Dream

15:30 - Blockchain is the first non-military application which pays people enough

16:45 - "The thing you're supposed to decentralize is power"

23:06 - What underlying principle led to the internet to being this way?

27:01 - How can users have a say in the way systems work?

32:07 - If you optimize for profit, you get immoral, profit-maximizing machines

36:52 - Can a decentralized system be corrupted?

43:05 - DLT and blockchain is short-sighted right now

50:12 - We haven't figured out how to beat the current financial system yet

52:18 - We can never build a fair system without humans in the loop

57:10 - Who are your role models?

Special Guest: Kirill Pimenov.

DeFi on Polkadot with Acala and Laminar: Part 2 Jun 22, 2020

Show notes

This week we talk to the Acala Network team and learn about the Acala Network and their Sovereign Wealth Fund.

Joe Petrowski (Research Analyst, Parity Technologies) speaks with Dr. Antonia Chen, Chief Econominst and Co-founder of Laminar and Acala, and Ruitao Su, CEO and Co-founder of Acala and Laminar. They are working on a governed protocol that enables decentralized finance applications on blockchain, allowing everyday users to join the DeFi revolution by leveraging the Acala stable token to create a Sovereign Wealth Fund and other defi applications.

Links:

Highlights:

01:00 - How is the Acala stablecoin different from MakerDAO?

04:50 - Deploying custom logic to interact with the Acala stable token

05:12 - Homa: how your funds can do more

08:00 - What is the decentralized Sovereign Wealth Fund?

10:55 - How the Sovereign Wealth Fund can generate returns

15:30 - A comparison to traditional sovereign wealth funds

16:59 - The Sovereign Wealth Fund as a parachain and beyond

20:53 - The many functions of tokens on Acala and Polkadot

25:05 - A digital society with Acala on Polkadot and Web3

26:12 - How will people use the many different protocols of Polkadot and Acala

Special Guests: Antonia Chen and Ruitao Su.

DeFi on Polkadot with Acala and Laminar: Part 1 Jun 08, 2020

Show notes

This week we talk to the Acala Network team and learn about their ventures in DeFi on Polkadot and Ethereum.

Joe Petrowski (Research Analyst, Parity Technologies) speaks with Dr. Antonia Chen, Chief Econominst and Co-founder of Laminar and Acala, and Ruitao Su, CEO and Co-founder of Acala and Laminar. They are working on a governed protocol that enables decentralized finance applications on blockchain, allowing everyday users to join the DeFi revolution by having margin trading, synthetic assets, stable coins, and integrated money markets all on the Polkadot network.

Links:

Highlights:

01:36 - What is Defi and how does it compare to traditional financial markets?

03:20 - What makes Defi more "fair" than traditional finance?

05:40 - What new things are possible with defi on blockchain?

10:20 - The limitations of DeFi

15:01 - 3 Protocols on Laminar: Margin trading, Synthetic assets and Integrated Money Markets

19:40 - 3 protocols on one chain or three?

21:15 - The issues with tokens on Ethereum

23:12 - Polkadot's shared security enabling better tokens / Why parachains are advantageous to smart contracts

26:05 - Dual-launch on Ethereum and Polkadot

30:04 - Going live on Polkadot

Special Guests: Antonia Chen and Ruitao Su.

The Economics of Next-Generation Blockchain Tokens May 21, 2020

Show notes

This week we dive deep into the economics of cryptocurrencies, proof of stake scenarios, and Polkadot's application of security, interoperability and token economics.

Joe Petrowski (Research Analyst, Parity Technologies) speaks with Stefanie von Jan, an economics lecturer at the FOM University of Applied Sciences for Economics and Management in Munich, Germany. Her interests in Austrian economics, Blockchain technology, and token economics led to her providing her expertise with founders and academics, and now shares her latest insights about Bitcoin and Polkadot with us.

Links:
Polkadot: Shared security or Single point of failure?
Medium Blog from Stefanie von Jan

Highlights:

02:15 - What makes blockchain economics unique?

03:50 - The Bitcoin token model

06:05 - A Keynesian cryptoeconomic model?

07:43 - Proof of Work vs. Proof of Stake

11:16 - How do we measure the value of a decentralized protocol?

13:42 - Are tokens tied to the value they intend to provide?

16:20 - Value competition of protocols and the applications on them

22:20 - What do Proof-of-Stake attack scenarios look like?

25:12 - Token security for Polkadot parachains

31:20 - The governance of parachain tokens

34:15 - Sound rule systems for parachains

Special Guest: Stefanie von Jan.

Deploying Dapps Quickly on Layer-2 at SKALE May 07, 2020

Show notes

This week we talk about layer-2 scaling and quick and easy deployment of Dapps. Joe Petrowski (Research Analyst, Parity Technologies) speaks with Christine Perry of SKALE labs, a layer-2 solution that augments applications and transactions built on public blockchains such as Ethereum. They discuss the developer experience on Ethereum and SKALE, interesting blockchain use cases, and why layer-2 is the solution for creating usable and powerful Dapps.

Links:
SKALE network
SKALE blog with Christine
SKALE blog regarding BLS signatures and Intel SGX

Highlights:
1:50 - The major problems for Dapp developers
3:40 - Enabling developers to run smart contracts on SKALE
4:42 - How SKALE speeds up development and throughput
5:55 - Why is layer-2 the solution?
8:02 - The role of layer-2 with Ethereum
10:08 - What are the best use cases for blockchain?
12:14 - SKALE's approach to applications on blockchain, and interesting use cases
15:45 - A layer-2 network with consensus!
20:32 - Beyond Ethereum: How SKALE is blockchain-agnostic

Special Guest: Christine Perry.

Blockchain for Climate Action and Smart Cities Apr 23, 2020

Show notes

This week we meet at the intersection of blockchain, climate action, smart cities, finance, and IoT.
Joe Petrowski (Research Analyst, Parity Technologies) speaks with Anita Mujumdar of Evercity, a blockchain-based platform to aid in financing sustainability projects to meet the UN’s 2030 climate action goals. They discuss climate finance, decentralized robot economies, using measurement and data to build the sustainable smart cities of tomorrow, and how Substrate and Polkadot are helping make Evercity’s mission a reality.

Links:
Evercity Website
DAO "Integral Platform for Climate Initiatives"
Anita’s presentation at COP25
Robonomics website
Climate Change Coalition - Digital Finance
Sub0 Online Substrate Developer and Community Conference

Highlights:
02:10 - What is climate finance?
06:50 - Sustainable cities approach
12:30 - What a sustainable city looks like
17:15 - Pilot programs
20:20 - Robonomics platform
25:35 - Role of DAO & blockchain
28:15 - Why decentralize climate finance?
31:00 - Trends outlook
32:15 - Why build on Substrate/Polkadot
34:50 - Launch plan

*The dates of the events mentioned in the podcast may have shifted due to coronavirus pandemic

Special Guest: Anita Mujumdar.

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