Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies
579 episodes - English - Latest episode: 8 days ago - ★★★★★ - 143 ratingsEpicenter 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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Episodes
Safe: Securing $100 Billion of Crypto Assets - Lucas Schor
April 18, 2024 14:22 - 1 hour - 60.8 MBWhat started out as a plan to build prediction markets, Gnosis ended up building crucial Ethereum infrastructure and tooling. Safe is one of its many successes, which originated during the 2017 ICO mania, as a solution for managing the raised capital securely, via a multi-sig. Even back then, the multi-sig model was quickly adopted by the entire industry, as a gold standard for asset security. Smart accounts and ERC-4337 represent the next step towards mass-adoption, through achieving a Web2...
Saga: 'Ethereum and Solana CAN NOT Scale. Our Chainlets Fix This!' - Rebecca Liao
April 11, 2024 14:21 - 52 minutes - 47.8 MBOne of the most important hurdles to mass adoption is represented by blockchain scalability, which also hinders the real-life utility of its numerous applications. While there are different solutions being experimented with, one should not overlook the importance of security and decentralisation. Saga introduces the concept of chainlets, interoperable Cosmos-based sovereign blockchains that share the security of Saga’s mainnet validator set. The majority of their parameters are fully customi...
Movement Labs: 'Facebook's MOVE Will Bring Billions of Users to Crypto' - Rushi Manche
April 06, 2024 09:16 - 58 minutes - 53.3 MBClassical, monolithic blockchains are inherently limited in their throughput due to their single-thread execution architecture. Modern VMs attempt to solve this issue through parallelisation being implemented from the get-go. Movement Labs employs the Move-VM to build a ZK L2 rollups on Ethereum, thus also deriving its security. Through parallel execution threads, Movement achieves a theoretical TPS of 160,000 while also ensuring sub-cent transaction fees. Topics covered in this episode: I...
Wintermute: 'Avoid These Trading Mistakes!' Secrets of a Market Maker - Yoann Turpin
March 30, 2024 09:28 - 1 hour - 74.7 MBMarket makers help create more efficient markets and liquid order books, by positioning themselves on the receiving end of a trade that other market participants are unwilling to fill. Quantitative analysis is crucial in determining their position and size. Wintermute defines itself as a tech-first company that also became one of the largest spot market making firms in Web3. From angel investing in Web2, to market making in Web3, Yoann Turpin (co-founder of Wintermute) has a vast experience ...
Gearbox Protocol: 'DeFi Is Boring, Let's Reinvent Credit' - Ivan & Mikael Lazarev
March 23, 2024 08:40 - 1 hour - 72.4 MBCredit is a widely used term, which could essentially be summarised as “more capital so you can do whatever you want”. In DeFi, there are numerous ways of getting exposure to an asset in a leveraged manner: from looping to perpetuals and margin trading, the possibilities are endless (especially when you also account for synthetic versions). Gearbox Protocol aims to create a universal, composable, on-chain ‘credit layer’, through credit account abstraction. This approach simultaneously addres...
Humayun Sheikh: Fetch AI – Decentralising AI Economies
March 16, 2024 10:54 - 57 minutes - 53 MBWhile large language models (LLMs) are rather passive from an economic perspective on their own, AI agents offer a preview of what truly autonomous AI applications can achieve. Fetch.ai aims to create a platform for economic interactions in the AI economy, where participants can provide many different kinds of stake, ranging from purely financial, in the form of cryptocurrency tokens, to utility based, in the form of data sets that LLMs can be trained on. It thus creates a supply chain that ...
Jasper De Goojier: SEDA – Intent-Based Modular Data Layer
March 09, 2024 10:52 - 54 minutes - 49.9 MBAs technology progresses, infrastructure should be commoditised, especially in Web3, in order to avoid the creation of bottlenecks and gatekeepers. Blockchains are naturally oblivious to off-chain data, so they need oracles to fetch data. However, given their past technical limitations, oracles have failed to provide a decentralised and permissionless framework for data query. SEDA seeks to change this by creating an intent-based modular data layer, which brings off-chain data on-chain, in o...
Anish Mohammed: Panther Protocol – Zero-Knowledge Compliant Privacy in DeFi
March 02, 2024 09:06 - 1 hour - 63.5 MBBlockchains are, by default, public ledgers containing every transaction recorded by the network. While this ensures transparency, it also violates users’ privacy once an address is linked to an entity. Apart from creating additional risk for self-custody, institutions are also limited by what they can publicly share on a blockchain. As a result, there is great demand and utility for on-chain, compliant privacy, which still requires KYC (& KYT), but protects them through cryptographic constr...
Gil Binder & Yair Cleper: Lava Network – Decentralising RPC and Node Providers
February 23, 2024 20:43 - 54 minutes - 50.1 MBThe monolithic blockchain era appears to be sunsetting. Among the first to contribute to this paradigm shift was Cosmos, which introduced the idea of specialized sovereign blockchains (appchains), made possible by the Cosmos SDK. Nowadays, the modular thesis employs external data availability and even execution solutions, which enables the creation of countless new chains. Each new blockchains comes with its own ‘specs’, and centralised RPC and node providers have to adapt to each chain’s se...
Zhiming Yang: Orbit Markets – Crypto Derivatives and Structured Products
February 17, 2024 10:55 - 1 hour - 62 MBProlonged range bound markets are a hallmark of bearmarkets and they usually end up chopping inexperienced or over leveraged traders. Customised structured products offer a solution for market participants that want to limit their downside, but also the upside, by introducing knock-outs at certain levels or triggers. Such custom options, usually with lower probabilistic chances of occurring, naturally come at a discount. This allows traders to hedge their risk, while also betting on certain ...
David Goldberg: Founders Pledge – Maximising Charity Efficiency & Impact
February 10, 2024 02:52 - 1 hour - 57.4 MBMeasuring the social impact of a charitable donation is, oftentimes, an impossible task. Founders Pledge is a non-profit organisation that aims to funnel and streamline donations from successful entrepreneurs in order to maximise their efficiency, based on data and research. Having built a network of nearly 2000 like-minded philanthropists, the vision behind Founders Pledge was to ensure transparency, unbiased assessment, ease of access and incentive alignment for its members. Despite the hu...
Lefteris Karapetsas: Rotki – From Ethereum Devcon 0 to Building Rotki
February 03, 2024 10:59 - 1 hour - 65.4 MBWe are, arguably, still early in the crypto industry, but some people were really…really early. One of them is Lefteris Karapetsas, who joined EthDev in 2014 and contributed to building the Ethereum ecosystem, since before the genesis block. His crypto journey is one for the history books, as after EthDev he joined Slock.it, right around the time of The DAO raise…and hack. Lefteris remained a core supporter of decentralisation and an active member of the Ethereum community, being involved (a...
David Minarsch: Autonolas – Autonomous AI Agents
January 27, 2024 09:07 - 1 hour - 61.2 MBThe Autonolas stack aims to address the ‘A’ in DAO (decentralised autonomous organisation), through its Open Autonomy framework, which enables the creation of autonomous, off-chain services for crypto applications. A key component for ensuring the proper operation of these off-chain autonomous economic agents, is the consensus mechanism. The protocol is overseen by the Governatooorr, the world’s first autonomous, AI-powered governor. We were joined by David Minarsch, co-founder of Valory, t...
Andreas Tsamados & Vijay Krishnavanshi: Fileverse: A Trustless Stack to Decentralize Knowledge and Collaboration
January 19, 2024 16:43 - 1 hour - 62.6 MBWeb2 file storage relies heavily on centralised entities, which have mostly outgrown their competitors, establishing a quasi-monopoly. The reasons for this are twofold: enormous operating costs and seamless user experience (e.g. social logins and account recovery), which, until recently, could only be solved through centralisation. Add to this the reluctance to change platforms as users need to re-upload their files, and you get an ossified user base. However, data leaks and hacks are a cons...
Andreas Tsamados & Vijay Krishnavanshi: Fileverse – Decentralised P2P File Sharing
January 19, 2024 16:43 - 1 hour - 62.6 MBWeb2 file storage relies heavily on centralised entities, which have mostly outgrown their competitors, establishing a quasi-monopoly. The reasons for this are twofold: enormous operating costs and seamless user experience (e.g. social logins and account recovery), which, until recently, could only be solved through centralisation. Add to this the reluctance to change platforms as users need to re-upload their files, and you get an ossified user base. However, data leaks and hacks are a cons...
Guy Itzhaki & Guy Zyskind: Fhenix – FHE-powered End-to-End Encrypted Ethereum L2
January 12, 2024 13:15 - 58 minutes - 53.7 MBFully homomorphic encryption, also known as the Holy Grail of cryptography, allows for computation to be performed on encrypted data, without the need for prior decryption. Its blockchain applications would enable programmable, institutional-grade, compliant privacy. With the addition of fhEVM libraries, solidity developers don’t have to worry about the complex cryptography and only decide what layers of the UX should be private. We were joined by Guy Itzhaki & Guy Zyskind, to discuss fully...
Illia Polosukhin: Near Protocol – From AI to High-Throughput Blockchain
January 06, 2024 16:25 - 1 hour - 81.3 MBWhat began as an AI company trying to seek solutions in order to pay remote (unbanked) workers, Near AI became, in 2018, Near Protocol. Its sharded design was inspired by modern database architecture and large language model (LLM) training. Near Protocol aimed to solve the scalability trilemma, through a modular approach, combining data availability sharding with stateless validation. By abstracting away archaic blockchain standards, Near basically enabled decentralised full stack developmen...
Isidoros Passadis: Lido DAO – Staking Decentralisation for Ethereum and LSTs in DeFi
December 30, 2023 15:04 - 1 hour - 83.2 MBAs Ethereum ‘merged’ to its current proof-of-stake consensus model, the steep (for retail) minimum stake of 32 ETH created a serious risk of centralisation through staking delegation to centralised entities. Lido DAO was envisioned to preserve staking decentralisation, while also providing additional value for staked ETH in the form of liquid staking tokens (LST). However, as its market share reached the first threshold of 33%, concerns have started to be voiced regarding Lido’s own risk of ...
Epicenter - 10-Year Anniversary Livestream
December 23, 2023 20:36 - 2 hours - 133 MB10 years ago, Adam B Levine, the host of ‘Let’s Talk Bitcoin!’, decided that it was time to encourage other voices to step onto the crypto podcast scene. Among many applicants, Sebastien and Brian were the only 2 Europeans, so Adam suggested that they teamed up in order to record the pilot episode. On December 20th 2013, Sebastien and Brian released ‘Regulation and the Future of Bitcoin’, which marked the beginning of a 10-year (and counting) long journey. The rest is history. On this anniv...
Aki Balogh: DLC Link – Self-Wrapped Bitcoin (dlcBTC)
December 16, 2023 09:32 - 1 hour - 58.6 MBgnosis.ioUnlike Ethereum ‘programmable money’, Bitcoin lacks native smart contracts by design. In an attempt to expand Bitcoin past its store of value narrative, wrapper contracts provided wBTC on other chains for DeFi applications. However, wBTC does not directly represent the native asset and it is, therefore, subject to potential exploits. DLC Link introduces a novel approach, by allowing entities to self-wrap dlcBTC. We were joined by Aki Balogh, co-founder of DLC Link, to discuss discr...
Yat Siu: Animoca Brands – From NFTs & Blockchain Gaming to the Open Metaverse
December 09, 2023 10:05 - 1 hour - 64.9 MBWhen it comes to NFTs and blockchain gaming, very few companies can rival with Animoca Brands’ early conviction, investment thesis and time horizon. They understood early on that community building and network effects are the core pillars for a true paradigm shift in gaming. However, culture and narratives transcend the boundaries of gaming, becoming social phenomena. Animoca’s latest undertaking, the Mocaverse, aims to unite communities in a truly open metaverse. We were joined by Yat Siu,...
Marek Olszewski & Rene Reinsberg: Celo – The Mobile-First High-Throughput Blockchain
December 01, 2023 11:56 - 1 hour - 61.6 MBWith an average block time of 5 seconds and sub-cent transaction gas fees, Celo focuses on scalability and ease of access in order to bring DeFi to those that need it the most. Celo’s vision of ensuring equal access is reflected through their mobile-first design, aiming to disrupt legacy TradFi. The upcoming transition to an L2 rollup aims to tap into Ethereum’s security, while maintaining minimal costs through Celo’s scalability and EigenLayer’s data availability solutions. We were joined ...
Rand Hindi: Zama - Fully Homomorphic Encryption in Blockchain Applications & Privacy
November 24, 2023 12:15 - 59 minutes - 54.3 MBHomo- (Greek prefix meaning ‘same’); -morphic (Greek suffix meaning ‘having a specific shape/form’) Intuitively, one could deduct that homomorphic encryption indicates that the initial data and the encrypted result (cipher) could share the same form. Based on this property, it can be inferred that computation can be performed on the encrypted data, without prior decryption. By decrypting the result, you get the same output as the computation performed on the unencrypted data. While homomorph...
Ye Zhang: Scroll - EVM-compatible ZK rollup
November 18, 2023 10:20 - 1 hour - 65.9 MB"The advancements of zero knowledge proving technology, hardware acceleration and proof recursion have significantly increased the efficiency of EVM-compatible zk provers. As a result, the former tradeoff in efficiency implied by EVM-compatibility is gradually improving. Translating Ethereum’s virtual machine bytecode ensures seamless scaling for applications, without the need for additional audits and security compromises. We were joined by Ye Zhang, co-founder of Scroll, to discuss the EV...
Charles d'Haussy: dYdX V4 - Decentralised Perpetual Exchange on a Cosmos Appchain
November 10, 2023 17:16 - 1 hour - 66.5 MBLeading decentralised perpetual exchange, dYdX V4 recently migrated to Cosmos to build its own sovereign appchain, in order to provide its users a much better trading experience, while continuing to deliver DeFi innovations (e.g. permisionless markets). By having full control over the appchain’s parameters, the dYdX DAOs can shape the future of the protocol, starting from the very bedrock, ensuring proper distribution and incentives for the validator set. From early adopter of L2 zero knowle...
Nick Johnson: ENS - Multichain ENS Domains and Decentralised Identities
November 04, 2023 08:30 - 1 hour - 60.6 MBThe very nature of Ethereum addresses, expressed as random hexadecimal character strings, represents a big hurdle for mass adoption, as they are not human-readable. ENS domains were envisioned to not only solve this and provide a seamless UX, but to also be the cornerstone of on-chain identities. However, in the current multichain landscape, a plethora of decentralised naming services arose, which led to a heterogeneous domain name pool. As a result, ENS aims to expand to L2s and non-EVM cha...
Simon Harman: Chainflip - Native cross-chain AMM
October 27, 2023 22:21 - 1 hour - 58.6 MBWhile competition fosters innovation, the proliferation of different blockchains has resulted in the fragmentation and isolation of liquidity within each ecosystem. Early attempts to address this issue primarily involved bridges and wrapped assets. Unfortunately, these solutions were often vulnerable to hacks and exploits, and the value of wrapped assets was contingent on the security of the wrapper contract, rather than the underlying asset. Cross-chain swaps of native assets hold the promi...
Guy Young: Ethena - USDe Synthetic Dollar via Delta-Neutral Staked Ethereum Hedging
October 20, 2023 19:16 - 52 minutes - 48.4 MBStablecoins represent a safe haven against crypto’s volatility, allowing participants to remain in the market, without off-ramping to fiat. While the major stablecoins are centrally issued (e.g. USDT, USDC, BUSD), there is a pressing need for an algorithmic variant or a synthetic dollar asset. (DAI is somewhere in between since approximately 50% of its collateral is USDC). After Luna’s collapse, many jumped to point out its design flaws, yet such a concept would be crucial for crypto’s decen...
Evgeny Yurtaev: Zerion - Web3 Wallet UX 2.0
October 13, 2023 19:44 - 57 minutes - 52.7 MBOne of the best known memes in crypto is: 'Not your keys, not your coins'. This usually resurfaces whenever a (custodial) centralised exchange is hacked or goes bust altogether. Although Web3 provides the infrastructure for self custody, this often shares the fate of Pandora. Self-custody requires increased security measures, from both end-users, as well as application developers. Web3 wallets are the interface between users and decentralised applications deployed on blockchains. While Metam...
Niklas Kunkel: Chronicle – Ethereum's First-Ever Oracle
October 06, 2023 16:43 - 1 hour - 65.2 MBBack in 2017, there was no DeFi as we know it today, yet MakerDAO were already envisioning and building towards what they thought to be a certainty. The backbone of DeFi is represented by stable coins, and MakerDAO quickly understood this: they set out to build a decentralised stable coin, $DAI (and its precursor $SAI). Being collateral-backed, the smart contract needs to know the value of that collateral, but any off-chain price data is not readily available on-chain. This is where oracles ...
Elias Simos: Rated Network - Reputation for Machines = Transparent Blockchain Infrastructure
September 28, 2023 08:48 - 1 hour - 63.9 MBData immutability and transparency are key features that define a blockchain’s public ledger. However, while transactions are indeed transparent, information surrounding the blockchain’s infrastructure layer is not readily available. Since Ethereum’s Merge to PoS and the introduction of staking delegation, actionable data on the validator and client status quos became crucial for the wellbeing of the network. Rated Network aims to build a reliable ‘reputation system for machines’ forming the...
Misha Komarov: =nil; Foundation – The Marketplace for ZK Proof Generation
September 22, 2023 12:12 - 52 minutes - 47.7 MBZero knowledge proof systems have found tremendous cryptographic utility in scaling blockchains, due to their ability to prove computational integrity, succinctly. However, despite recent advancements in ZKP R&D, their construction still requires special prover circuits. Their complexity is what gatekeeps zero knowledge technology to a select few astute teams. =nil; Foundation aims to challenge this status quo by providing an alternative through their zkLLVM circuit compiler and zk proof mar...
Robbie Ferguson: Immutable - The Web3 Gaming one-stop-shop
September 16, 2023 02:14 - 1 hour - 56.1 MBApart from its numerous financial applications, blockchain technology could also disrupt the gaming industry, causing a paradigm shift towards true digital ownership, one that would create new incentive models for both players, as well as developers. Up until recently, technological barriers seemed cumbersome for most game developers, but the advancements of layer 2 scaling solutions made on-chain integrations viable. Immutable set out to create an all-in-one platform for developers, empower...
Stani Kulechov: Lens Protocol – Decentralised Social Media Primitive
September 08, 2023 23:15 - 51 minutes - 47.5 MBSocial media revolves around content creation, and while the content itself could be tokenised through NFTs, SocialFi aims to take it a step further. The recently released friend.tech app went to show that users might be interested in something more than just content - creator shares. This implicitly links back to handles and profiles, and we can slowly start to unveil the primitives of social media. Lens Protocol predates the friend.tech venture, in both timeline, as well as scope. While so...
Stephane Gosselin: Frontier Research - Solving Ethereum's MEV Problem
September 01, 2023 22:00 - 1 hour - 55.8 MBThe maximal extractable value (MEV) problem, if left unchecked, could represent an existential threat to Ethereum’s core values. One might argue that it is a natural result of solving market inefficiencies, but it entices to centralisation and collusion in order to extract the highest amount of value. Additionally, through front-running and back-running, it creates unnecessary overhead, which caused up to 2.4% of the total network congestion back in DeFi summer of 2020 (according to Flashbot...
Marko Baricevic: Cosmos SDK - The Internet of Appchains
August 25, 2023 22:35 - 58 minutes - 53.2 MBFrom the very beginning, Cosmos set out to provide an alternative to the monolithic blockchain architecture proposed by Ethereum. Cosmos SDK was the cornerstone of this vision, as it allowed developers to spin up blockchains effortlessly. Its modularity enabled custom, self-sovereign chains to become a reality. And, instead of being a jack of all trades, those chains were centred around a sole purpose, thus transforming them into appchains. In turn, as the ecosystem grew, appchains had to be...
Sandeep Nailwal: Polygon 2.0 - The New Value Layer of the Internet?
August 18, 2023 15:12 - 1 hour - 64.8 MBWhat started out as Matic Network, in 2017, and later rebranded to Polygon, in 2021, it is now facing another major milestone: Polygon 2.0. Apart from a tokenomics update, their plans include building an aggregation layer for every scaling solution that will settle on Ethereum. This will not only provide crucial rollup interoperability, but it will also further offload Ethereum by recursively combining multiple proofs into a single one. We were joined by Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polyg...
Stephen Young & Storm: NFTFi – P2P NFT Lending Protocol: From PFPs & Art to RWA
August 11, 2023 15:56 - 1 hour - 61.1 MBAfter a 2021 frothy bull market, NFTs are currently experiencing the depression phase of the market cycle. However, despite the fact that only NFT art has truly found its product-market fit, NFTs in general represented the consumerist moment for crypto. In addition, they also provided a solution for tokenising real world assets (RWA) and intangibles, potentially penetrating markets worth hundreds of trillions of dollars. Moreover, similar to digital art, the advent of AI poses a challenge wh...
Alex Gluchowski: zkSync - A new Era for EVM-compatible zk rollups
August 04, 2023 20:32 - 1 hour - 72.2 MBEthereum scaling solutions often resort to tradeoffs, sacrificing security or decentralisation in favour of scalability. However, zk rollups hold the potential of increasing throughput, while also inheriting the layer 1’s security. This is achieved through zero knowledge validity proofs, which are published on Ethereum mainnet. The final hurdle remains the sequencer decentralisation. zkSync was designed around EVM-compatibility, offering custom scaling solutions through its hyperchain archit...
Patrick O'Grady: Avalanche – Building High Performance VMs With HyperSDK
July 28, 2023 11:10 - 1 hour - 71 MBThe recent history of L2s has shown that there doesn’t need to be ‘one chain to rule them all’ or an ‘ETH killer’. Instead, a healthier approach would be to find the best solution for a specific need, taking into consideration any potential tradeoffs. Avalanche has done just that, focusing from the get-go on delivering high transaction throughput, using their unique subnet architecture, consensus protocol and warp messaging. HyperSDK continues this conviction, offering a framework for develo...
Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum - MEV, Staking Derivatives and Privacy (EthCC 6)
July 22, 2023 10:20 - 1 hour - 58.1 MBWe couldn’t miss EthCC 6 and we got to sit down with Vitalik Buterin to discuss hot topics from the Ethereum ecosystem: MEV, staking derivatives, privacy, decentralisation and future interoperability. Ethereum’s merge to proof-of-stake brought with it the emergence of liquid staking derivatives (LSD). Similarly to mining pools in proof-of-work consensus models, staking pools could pose a risk to Ethereum’s decentralisation. In terms of privacy preserving solutions, the advances in zero knowl...
Avril Dutheil: Neutron – Interchain Smart Contracts on Cosmos
July 14, 2023 17:00 - 1 hour - 71 MBBlockchains are secured through the economic incentives offered to their validators/miners. The more robust the network effect among validators, the more difficult it is for that blockchain to be compromised. However, building a truly decentralised and reliable validator set is not a trivial task. As a result, hub and spoke ecosystem designs like Cosmos’ (and even Polkadot’s), aim to share the main hub’s validator set and security to their ‘consumer’ chains (parachains in Polkadot’s case). N...
Sveinn Valfells: Monerium – Regulated On-Chain Euro (EURe)
July 07, 2023 13:14 - 59 minutes - 54.9 MBStablecoins represent the backbone of DeFi, allowing complex financial applications to be protected from external volatility. From fiat-backed to algorithmic, there are multiple approaches to issuing and backing stablecoins. While US regulations are looming over the crypto industry, Monerium released a fully regulated on-chain euro stablecoin, the EURe, enabling direct SEPA transfers, on- and off-ramp. We were joined by Sveinn Valfells, CEO of Monerium, to discuss the European E-Money Direc...
Eli Ben-Sasson: Starknet - zk-STARKs and Cairo 1.0 upgrade
June 30, 2023 18:55 - 1 hour - 62.2 MBLayer 2 zero knowledge roll-ups have initially been used for achieving private transactions on blockchains. However, past simple transfers, interacting with a public smart contract posed a serious challenge. As research and technology evolved, proof construction became much more efficient, enabling zk-powered scalability. There is a variety of pros and cons for each type of proof system, but given the impending rise of qunatum computers, we have witnessed a recent migration from SNARKs to ST...
Luka Müller: Sygnum Bank & MME Legal – Crypto Regulations & Institutional Investors
June 23, 2023 13:48 - 56 minutes - 51.5 MBAs institutional money set their eyes on crypto, some degree of centralisation and regulation was inevitable. However, the key aspect is to limit it to access gateways and not affect protocols’ decentralisation. Recent events have shown that price manipulation is easily achieved in conditions of low liquidity, hence regulated fiat on- and off-ramps will, in the end, also benefit retail consumers. It once again all boils down to achieving these goals while maintaining privacy for users and en...
Epicenter – Looking Back on 10 Years of Crypto. AI Doom & Gloom? SPECIAL
June 16, 2023 12:29 - 1 hour - 75 MBAs Epicenter hits the 500 episode milestone, our hosts look back on almost 10 years of crypto developments, analysing the good, the bad and the ugly. What projects & narratives have surprised our hosts? Has Bitcoin failed in becoming a reliable store of value? Will ZK proofs provide the much needed solution to AI’s alignment problem? Last but not least, are we still early? Get ready for a fascinating discussion, albeit gloomy for this special occasion. Thank you for being part of this amazi...
Zac Williamson & Joe Andrews: Aztec - Privacy-preserving, hybrid ZK rollup
June 09, 2023 16:03 - 1 hour - 71.7 MBIn order to achieve true transaction privacy, it is not enough to encrypt or build ZK proofs for transaction bundles, as long as the underlying blockchain uses an account-based model. Aztec is building a ZKVM that superposes an UTXO model, so that balances are constantly updated as new, untraceable, log entries. The upcoming Aztec 3 aims to enable privacy-preserving smart contracts, using a hybrid, multi-layered rollup. This approach allows for both public and private smart contracts to be e...
Fig: Squid Router – Sub-20 Second Cross-Chain Swaps. Axelar-Powered Interoperability
June 02, 2023 13:29 - 46 minutes - 42.4 MBAs crypto evolves, it becomes clearer that the future will be multi-chain. Presently, moving funds between different blockchains is frustrating...to say the least. The current bridging solutions are prohibitive from a UX perspective, mainly due to how finality is reached across different blockchains. This translates to long wait times and anxiety when interacting with new protocols, caused by the incertitude of funds arriving safely on the other side. Another major blockage consists of gas f...
Collin Myers & Oisín Kyne: Obol Network - Distributed Validator Technology (DVT)
May 27, 2023 14:33 - 1 hour - 64.7 MBEthereum's merge and transition to a proof-of-stake consensus implied switching from proof-of-work mining to transactions being validated by entities that have an economic stake in the network. Proof-of-stake distributed networks are subject to complex game theory models (e.g. slashing). Distributed validator technology (DVT) enables a more modular validator stack at every level: key pairs, hardware and entities. This reduces trust dependencies and increases security for validator entities. ...
Ben DiFrancesco: Umbra – Privacy Preserving Token Transfers
May 19, 2023 14:51 - 1 hour - 63.3 MBPublic transaction history in blockchains represents one of their key features which, alongside immutability, aim to provide an alternative to CeFi. However, this transparency comes at a price: privacy. As a result, different solutions have been proposed, that preserve privacy while maintaining all the other benefits of blockchain technology, but there currently isn't a one-size-fits-all answer to this problem. For example, zero knowledge proofs convey the validity of a transaction batch wit...