The Crypto Conversation

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The Creator Economy - Rally uses Social Tokens & NFTs to monetize Creators Sep 14, 2021

Show notes

Chris Fortier is Vice President of Product at Rally, a project built on Ethereum that helps creators develop economic relationships with their audiences by launching their own crypto social tokens and NFTs.

Why you should listen:

Rally builds tools for creators to launch and grow their crypto economies. Rally started with social tokens but has always imagined a world where a creator's crypto economy included both fungible tokens and NFTs.

Fans want reasons to buy, use and hold social tokens and creators have pioneered countless ways to power experiences with those tokens. But they also want tangible goods and services — as well as experiences — that they can own in exchange for those social tokens. NFTs and social tokens paired together tie the creator's crypto economy into a cohesive whole.

Rally is building NFT capabilities that allow creators to focus on utility and collectability versus scarcity. They believe that the true economic value of NFTs will come from creators and their fans using NFTs to drive connections, particularly if creators allow more of their fan-base to participate. By enabling these utility-based NFT use cases, Rally is opening up a world for creators to experiment in their engagements with their fans and focus on offerings that delight their broader fan base rather than a small set of deep-pocketed speculators.

Supporting links:

Rally

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The Shaman - Elyseos is an ecosystem for the sacramental medicine movement Sep 09, 2021

Show notes

Maestro Bignose is a co-founder of Elyseos, a decentralized ecosystem designed to support the evolving Sacramental Medicine space. Sacramental medicines include psychedelic plants and fungi. The Elyseos DAO supports the evolving ecosystem with compassionate feedback loops incentivizing collaboration and decentralization.

Why you should listen:

As people search for meaning, and alternative ways of healing, Sacramental Medicines are bursting into the mainstream. The risks in this emergence include dilution, corruption, decay, centralization, control, and capture. Middlemen and 'authorities' can excessively appropriate the value generated while excluding dedicated servants, discoverers, and long-time practitioners.

Maestro Bignose compares the new world of blockchain and Web3 to the ancient world of shamans. He says, "It is a wonderful meeting between one unregulated sphere so ancient it is forgotten by the mainstream and another unregulated sphere just birthing and completely nascent. Decentralized ledgers bypass the legacy system, whose top-down hierarchical control structures tend to be resistant and inimical to what shamanic medicines represent. These two universes share in being fundamentally distributed, robust, private, and by their nature not amenable to capture and control. They often escape. They both teach us to take deep responsibility for our agency rather than handing it off to a third party. Control your set and setting is similar to not your keys, not your coins."

Elyseos is built on the Fantom network. This ecosystem will use a utility token - ELYS which you can buy on ZooDEX. To buy ELYS you will need MetaMask installed with the Fantom Opera network active on it.

Supporting links:

Elyseos

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The Crypto Crash - BTC is legal tender in El Salvador, the President buys the dip Sep 07, 2021

Show notes

Andy Pickering is here with a weekly crypto market update where we look through the volatile world of crypto Twitter to tease out the most important narratives and data points. This week Bitcoin crashed overnight dropping 10% to US$43,000. The dump happened on the same day that El Salvador made Bitcoin legal tender and became the first nation-state to buy Bitcoin.

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Star Trekking - Jules Urbach is the Elon Musk of Rendering Sep 07, 2021

Show notes

Jules Urbach is the CEO of OTOY, a leading cloud graphics company that is pioneering technology to redefine content creation and delivery. The work of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry is being cataloged in a new digital archive by OTOY.

Why you should listen:

RNDR, whose partners include Amazon, Google, Apple, and HBO, developed a cutting-edge platform based on underlying OTOY technology that allows individuals to create graphics at the same level as Hollywood studios. RNDR is revolutionizing visual effects by using the cloud to democratize GPUs and other rendering resources. It also seeks to provide energy-efficient solutions for creating NFTs.

Jules' best friend from childhood is Rod Roddenberry. Jules is working on a new digital archive of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry's legacy. The Roddenberry Archive will feature the flagship Star Trek series, original films, and spinoffs in a variety of formats including digital and holographic renderings, documents, images, models, and blueprints. The archive will capture deep 3D asset metadata from assets, images, blueprints, and models using RNDR, OTOY's blockchain GPU computing network. In order to capture original studio and physical assets at the highest level of photographic fidelity, the archive will leverage OTOY's LightStage Academy-Award-winning facial scanning service, generating the first comprehensive lighting and reflectance data set for future archival use. Iconic artist Mike "Beeple" Winklemann is joining the Roddenberry Archive project as a creative consultant, and, alongside legendary painter and illustrator Alex Ross, will help commemorate the Roddenberry Archive and cross-link it to both the Alex Ross and Beeple RNDR Archives.

Supporting links:

OTOY

Jules on Twitter

Castle Island Stablecoin paper

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The Future of FX - DFX is a DEX for stablecoins Sep 02, 2021

Show notes

DFX is an Ethereum-based decentralized exchange protocol with a dynamically tuned bonding curve optimized for fiat-backed stablecoins using real-world FX price feeds. Mainstream adoption of Web 3.0 requires assets that are protected from price volatility. By focusing on fiat-backed stablecoins on the Ethereum blockchain, DFX leverages the existing defi ecosystem to bootstrap humanity's next-generation foreign exchange.

Why you should listen:

DFX is a decentralized foreign exchange protocol optimized for stablecoins. In building the protocol, DFX will bring liquidity and volume to fiat-backed stablecoins globally. The next generation of global finance cannot rely solely on USD-pegged stablecoins. A decentralized protocol where users can efficiently exchange stablecoins pegged to various foreign currencies is not only important but necessary.

DFX has added the NZDs, the New Zealand Dollar Stable Coin to the protocol. NZDs is a New Zealand Dollar (NZD) Stable Coin backed 1:1 with physical New Zealand Dollars in a cash and cash equivalent treasury managed by a New Zealand registered financial services provider. New Zealand's currency is a leader in adaptability, resilience, and market trustworthiness. NZD is the 10th most traded currency globally. The NZD stable coin will offer cryptocurrency users the stability and utility of the New Zealand Dollar with the versatility of a cryptocurrency. The NZDs is issued by Techemynt.

Supporting links:

DFX

NZD Stablecoin

Techemynt

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FLUF Metagame - Supercharging NFTs with the Altered State Machine Sep 01, 2021

Show notes

Aaron McDonald and Brooke Howard-Smith are co-founders at Non-Fungible Labs, the team behind the FLUF World NFTs. FLUF World is home to 10,000 unique 3D animated rabbits. The FLUF metagame describes the emerging, expanding metaverse treasure hunt that the FLUFs exist in.

Why you should listen:

FLUFs have been programmatically generated from 270 attributes across 14 categories to be entirely unique by at least three degrees of separation. This also excludes their expression, dance, scene, and soundtrack. Non-Fungible Labs have an exciting roadmap that will continue to unlock ever-increasing, advanced functionality for FLUFs.

The future of the digital world will be expansive and complex. Smart agents are needed to help navigate these always-on spaces. Altered State Machine is a framework to track ownership of AI agents in any digital environment.

Supporting links:

FLUF World

Altered State Machine

Non-Fungible Labs

Aaron talks Centrality

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Yield Aggregator - Vaulty enables automatic asset allocation across DeFi Aug 30, 2021

Show notes

Konstantin is the founder and CEO of Vaulty Finance - a vault that bridges Defi and NFTs on the Binance Smart chain. The Vaulty platform is a yield aggregator that offers multiple strategies to optimize yield farming through regular auto-compounding.

Why you should listen:

Vaulty is a decentralized platform designed to enable automatic asset allocation across DeFi instruments. Every vault has its own smart contract with predetermined logic. Choose your vault and passively earn yields or NFTs stress-free. Vaults allow users to minimize network fees and time spent researching the best instruments. Vaulty unites the power of DeFi and NFT. Vaulty is a unique profit-sharing yield aggregator that incorporates both traditional DeFi and NFT yield strategies into the same decentralized platform. Konstantin shares some fascinating stories on what it was like to grow up in rural Russia and why so many talented poker and chess players are Russian.

Supporting links:

Vaulty

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Mass Adoption - Abra, the Crypto Bank for everyone Aug 26, 2021

Show notes

Bill Barhydt is the CEO of Abra, a platform that enables crypto banking services for consumers and institutions in over 100 countries. Abra's mission is to become a crypto bank that replaces the need for legacy banking services. Bill was a member of the Cryptography Mailing List where Satoshi first released the Bitcoin White Paper. Bill started his career working in cryptography for the CIA.

Why you should listen:

Abra is making cryptocurrency investing simple. Abra operates an easy-to-use smartphone-based wallet, exchange, high yield interest accounts, and lending service supporting 125 digital assets. Users can buy, sell, store, and invest in cryptocurrencies and manage their crypto investments, in one app. Their vision is an open, global financial system that is easily accessible to everyone. Bill is a globally recognized technology pioneer with a unique perspective on the early days of the internet and blockchain. Bill started his career working in R&D at the CIA and NASA. Bill was one of the early team members at Netscape where he was involved in building the core infrastructure that helped grow the consumer Internet we use today.

Supporting links:

Abra

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Morgan Stanley buys Bitcoin, Only Fans Nudes are back, and Generative Art booms Aug 25, 2021

Show notes

Andy Pickering is here with a weekly crypto market update where we look through the volatile world of crypto Twitter to tease out the most important narratives and data points. This week Morgan Stanley's SEC Filings reveal it has purchased a large holding of Bitcoin via the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. Only Fans has reversed its decision to ban sexually explicit content, and the NFT market continues to boom as a new wave of Generative Art is released.

Supporting links:

Nexo