Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies
579 episodes - English - Latest episode: 20 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
Cassidy Daly & Lucas Vogelsang: Centrifuge – Introducing Real-World DeFi
June 30, 2021 11:55 - 1 hour - 67.8 MBCentrifuge is an open and permissionless protocol built on Polkadot and Ethereum that unlocks collateral for DeFi. Centrifuge allows for the tokenization of real world assets such as invoices, real estate, or goods, and puts them on the blockchain. This allows users to borrow against these assets from investors. Investors lend dai in exchange for an interest rate that depends on the borrower and the asset used as collateral. We were joined by Lucas Vogelsang, CEO & Centrifuge Co-founder, an...
Dankrad Feist: Ethereum Foundation – An Eth2 Progress Update #2
June 22, 2021 13:37 - 55 minutes - 60 MBEthereum 2.0 is an upgrade to the Ethereum network that aims to improve the network's security and scalability. Recently, we chatted to Danny Ryan about the Merge and switch to Proof of Stake. As a follow up to that episode, we were joined by Dankrad Feist, who heads the sharding and statelessness research at the Ethereum Foundation. We dove deep into the technical infrastructure of how Eth2 addresses scaling through sharding, the pros and cons of data shards vs. execution shards, and how t...
Alex Gluchowski: zkSync – The First EVM-Compatible zkRollup Protocol
June 15, 2021 12:25 - 1 hour - 72.3 MBzkSync is a trustless protocol for scalable low-cost transactions on Ethereum. It's also the only zkRollup protocol which supports EVM smart contracts. Alex Gluchowski is co-founder of Matter Labs, and co-creator of zkSync. We spoke with Alex in depth about how the protocol works and the potential for a highly scalable transaction and application layer on Ethereum. Topics covered in this episode: Alex's background and how he got into the crypto space An overview of existing Ethereum scal...
Roman Semenov: Tornado Cash – Keeping Your Ethereum Transactions Private
June 08, 2021 12:28 - 41 minutes - 46.6 MBBy default, all transactions made on Ethereum are public. Tornado Cash is a decentralized privacy preserving solution built on Ethereum which adds privacy through obfuscation. Users can place Ether and some stable coins in prescribed increments [1 Eth, 10 Eth, 100 Eth...] into the Tornado Pool. In return, they are issued a private note, with which they can withdraw funds at a later time to a different address. We were joined by Roman Semenov, co-founder of Tornado Cash, to talk about how th...
Alex Masmej: Showtime – Building the Open Social Graph With NFTs
June 02, 2021 02:07 - 1 hour - 70.7 MBNon-fungible tokens (NFTs) are tokens that we can use to represent ownership of unique items. They let us tokenize things like art, collectibles, even real estate. They can only have one official owner at a time and they're secured by the Ethereum blockchain. And they have taken the crypto space by storm is recent months. Showtime is a NFT social media network where creators & collectors showcase their digital art. It reads all marketplaces and instead of buying and selling, you can comment,...
Danny Ryan: Ethereum Foundation – An Eth2 Progress Update
May 27, 2021 02:17 - 1 hour - 79.8 MBEthereum will switch from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS) likely already later this year in a much anticipated upgrade to Ethereum 2. The switch to PoS aims to make Ethereum both more secure and more sustainable by securing the network through Ether instead of mining. A second Eth2 update will address scaling through sharding at a later time. Danny Ryan, Researcher with Ethereum Foundation, has been a major driving force behind the Eth2 project. He joined us for a progress updat...
Scoopy Trooples: Alchemix – Financial Alchemy Through Self-Repaying Loans
May 21, 2021 12:31 - 1 hour - 57.9 MBAlchemix is a DeFi protocol that enables users to create self-repaying loans. Users deposit collateral (DAI) to take out a loan in Alchemix's native synthetic stablecoin, alUSD. Alchemix then uses the DAI deposits and puts them into the Yearn protocol to earn yield and over time, that yield automatically pays off your debt. We were joined by Alchemix co-founder Scoopy Trooples, who gave us a deep look into how the protocol works, alUSD and the ALCX token, and what is coming out soon with V2...
Michael Egorov: Curve Finance – The Stablecoin Exchange Protocol
May 13, 2021 00:24 - 52 minutes - 56.2 MBCurve is an Automated Market Maker (AMM) that lets users and other decentralized protocols exchange stablecoins (DAI to USDC for example) with low fees and low slippage. Unlike exchanges that match a buyer and a seller, users transact with the smart contract itself. By providing a flatter curve targeted for relatively stable pairs, Curve has established the lead position for these markets. Curve is also leveraging its own token CRV to incentivize long-term adoption of the protocol and decent...
Tim Roughgarden: EIP-1559 – Tackling the Gas Fee Problem on Ethereum
May 07, 2021 22:29 - 1 hour - 96.8 MBEthereum Improvement Proposal (EIP)-1559 is a proposal to make several tightly coupled additions to Ethereum’s transaction fee mechanism. Central to the design is a base fee, which plays the role of a reserve price and is meant to match supply and demand. Every transaction included in a block must pay that block’s base fee (per unit of gas), and this payment is burnt rather than transferred to the block’s miner. The base fee is adjusted after every block, with larger-than-target blocks incre...
Phil Daian & Stephane Gosselin: Flashbots – The Good, Bad and the Ugly of MEV
April 28, 2021 08:59 - 1 hour - 97.9 MBFlashbots is a research and development company focussed on Miner Extractable Value (MEV). MEV is the profit a miner can make through their ability to arbitrarily include, exclude, or re-order transactions from the blocks they produce. Flashbots has created a fork of the ethereum geth client, MEV-geth, to allow miners to exploit MEV, currently run by 80% of miners. Co-founders of Flashbots, Stephane Gosselin and Phil Daian, recently joined us to chat about the protocol and to deep dive into...
Using AI to Bridge Real and Virtual Worlds
April 22, 2021 12:32 - 1 hour - 64.4 MBTrevor McFedries joined us for a fascinating chat about his background in the football and music industries, and how this led him into crypto. Trevor is the cofounder of Brud, a technology startup specializing in artificial intelligence and media. At Brud, they create social media personas with the help of CGI technology, the most well known being Lil Miquela. Lil Miquela is a sentient robot navigating life in LA -- and has millions of followers on instagram. Trevor also started Friends Wit...
Trevor McFedries: Brud – Using AI to Bridge Real and Virtual Worlds
April 22, 2021 12:32 - 1 hour - 64.4 MBTrevor McFedries joined us for a fascinating chat about his background in the football and music industries, and how this led him into crypto. Trevor is the cofounder of Brud, a technology startup specializing in artificial intelligence and media. At Brud, they create social media personas with the help of CGI technology, the most well known being Lil Miquela. Lil Miquela is a sentient robot navigating life in LA -- and has millions of followers on instagram. Trevor also started Friends Wit...
Adrian Eidelman: RSK – The Bitcoin-Based Smart Contract Platform
April 19, 2021 12:40 - 1 hour - 63.8 MBBitcoin just got smarter. This episode is brought to you by RSK, the Bitcoin-based smart contract platform leading the DeFi for Bitcoin revolution. Be part of the future while building your personal wealth with the Bitcoin you already have. RSK is a secure smart-contract platform that enables decentralized applications secured by the Bitcoin Network to empower people and improve the quality of life of millions. The platform incorporates a Turing Complete Virtual Machine to Bitcoin. RSK bel...
Matt Luongo: tBTC – Bringing Trustless Bitcoin to Ethereum
April 14, 2021 11:00 - 1 hour - 63.4 MBThe ability to move Bitcoin on other chains isn't a new idea, and many are trying to overcome the technical limitations which make this a technically challenging feat. The latest representation of Bitcoin on Ethereum is tBTC, a fully-backed ERC-20 token representing bitcoin collateral. tBTC is fully decentralized and relies on Keep Network, a decentralized multi-party computation which enables cross-chain bridging. We were joined by Matt Luongo, CEO of Thesis (the team behind tBTC and Keep...
Sergej Kunz: 1inch – The DEX Aggregator
April 07, 2021 09:48 - 1 hour - 68.8 MB1inch Exchange is a DEX aggregator routing cryptocurrency purchases through different DEXs to reduce slippage and get a better conversion rate for the user compared with just using a single DEX. The platform launched its governance token, 1INCH, in December 2020. We were joined by Co-founder of 1inch Sergej Kunz to chat about how 1inch works, how the 1INCH token provides liquidity to their liquidity platform, its integration with platforms such as Uniswap, and the roadmap from here. Topics...
Zubin Koticha: Opyn – The Release of V2
April 01, 2021 18:09 - 1 hour - 72.6 MBZubin Koticha, CEO & Co-founder of Opyn, joined us again on the show to give us an update on Opyn v2. Opyn v1 was focused on insurance. It's successor, Opyn v2, offers a more traditional options infrastructure. We discuss the problems of building trustless options infrastructure: choice of collateral, partial collateralization and efficient trading mechanisms for options. Topics covered in this episode: An overview of Opyn v1 and the different options created by DeFi users How options in...
Kolten Bergeron & Robert Lauko: Liquity – The Decentralized Borrowing Protocol
March 26, 2021 15:11 - 1 hour - 76 MBLiquity is a decentralized borrowing protocol that allows you to draw interest-free loans against Ether used as collateral. In addition to the collateral, the loans are secured by a Stability Pool containing LUSD and by fellow borrowers collectively acting as guarantors of last resort. Liquity as a protocol is non-custodial, immutable, and governance-free. We were joined by Robert Lauko, CEO & Co-founder, and Kolten Bergeron, Head of Growth, of Liquity. We chatted about how the protocol is ...
Joey Zacherl: KeeperDAO – The On-Chain Liquidity Underwriter
March 19, 2021 13:43 - 1 hour - 73.9 MBKeeperDao is an on-chain liquidity underwriter for DeFi that combines yield farming and profits single-block arbitrage. The mining pool for Keepers incentivizes a game theory optimal strategy for cooperation among arbitrageurs. Their goal is to capture profit opportunities and distribute them to the various participants involved. We were joined by Joey Zacherl, Co-founder of KeeperDAO, to chat about what the protocol does and its mission, the grim triggering strategy, the ongoing hiding ga...
Alex Salnikov: Rarible – The NFT Transformation
March 11, 2021 16:36 - 1 hour - 72.2 MBNFTs are a new paradigm that opens possibilities for new types of interactions. In digital art, it has caught on like wildfire and is transforming how people think of ownership. Alex Salnikov has been immersed in the crypto world for many years and recognized the potential of NFTs. He created Rarible, an NFT marketplace that has seen rapid growth. But the vision of Rarible is to be more an open transaction protocol for NFTs and serve many different markets. He joined us to discuss the dif...
Julien Bouteloup: Stake Capital/Rekt – Uncovering the Dark Side of DeFi
March 03, 2021 17:08 - 1 hour - 82.2 MBJulien Bouteloup is a serial entrepreneur, Ethereum developer and addict of crazy innovative ideas. He started his entrepreneurial career building websites and selling hardware technologies at age 14. Today he is involved with many projects including Stake Capital, Rekt, Curve Finance, and he advises several crypto companies. Julien strives to bring to light the dark side of crypto. As DeFi grows, so do the number of questionable projects and ethical concerns around certain practices. Julie...
Tieshun Roquerre: Namebase – Decentralizing DNS and Certificate Authorities
February 23, 2021 18:00 - 1 hour - 82.3 MBNamebase is a top-level domain (TLD) name registrar that operates on the Handshake blockchain. It creates an ecosystem of TLDs that may be bought and sold using an on-chain auction mechanism. It takes a different approach to other decentralized domain name systems as Namebase is compatible with the ICANN namespace, the organization governs domain names globally. Users may register TLDs that don't yet exist in the ICANN namespace, like .epicenter or .ethereum, for example, creating the opport...
Muneeb Ali: Stacks – Building Decentralized Apps and Smart Contracts on Bitcoin
February 16, 2021 23:00 - 1 hour - 70 MBStacks is an open-source network of decentralized apps and smart contracts. It is a Layer-1 blockchain that connects to Bitcoin. Stacks uses a Proof of Transfer mining mechanism with bidding and staking capabilities. Clarity is the programming language used, a Turing-incomplete language which aims to give developers a safe way to build complex smart contracts where the code itself clearly shows what the program will do when run. Muneeb Ali is the CEO and Co-founder of Hiro Systems, one of ...
Alexis Sellier & Eleftherios Diakomichalis: Radicle – The Decentralized Platform for Code Collaboration
February 10, 2021 16:00 - 1 hour - 76.7 MBRadicle is a decentralized platform for code collaboration. It's built on Git and is an open-source decentralized alternative to platforms like GitHub. Tools like Radicle are an essential component of the decentralized technology stack and will enable DAOs to commit code through governance. Co-founders Alexis Sellier & Eleftherios Diakomichalis joined us to chat about why they felt it was important to create Radicle and how it fits into the DAO ecosystem with a more accessible governance s...
Harsh Rajat: Ethereum Push Notification Service – The Decentralized Notification Protocol
February 02, 2021 19:19 - 1 hour - 65.8 MBEthereum Push Notification Service (EPNS) emerged from the Indian startup scene in 2020. It's a decentralized notification protocol that enables DApps to send push notifications to Ethereum wallet users. EPNS also provides incentives to users that opt-in for push notifications, creating the possibility for an ecosystem communities around topic-centric channels. We are joined by Harsh Rajat, Project Lead and Co-founder of EPNS. We chatted about why and how the protocol was built, its technic...
Aaron Wright: The LAO – DAOs From a Legal Perspective
January 26, 2021 17:33 - 1 hour - 74.5 MBAaron Wright is a professor at Cardozo Law School and Co-founder of OpenLaw. Before this he was a successful entrepreneur, having sold his first company to Wikia - the for-profit version of Wikipedia. Today Aaron is a renowned thought-leader in the blockchain space at the forefront of DAOs. Last year OpenLaw launched The LAO, a DAO on Ethereum for investors looking to earn returns on Ethereum-based projects. Aaron joins us to share his expert legal knowledge on all things DAO, and discuss h...
Trent Elmore: YAM Finance 🍠 – The Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of the OG Foodcoin
January 19, 2021 18:49 - 1 hour - 67.8 MBDuring the DeFi Summer of 2020, YAM Finance launched with a bang, and had its share of ups and downs within its first couple of days. It started out as an experiment to bring together some of the more innovative ideas in the space. It sparked a movement which brought massive attention to yield farming, and started the food token craze. After a bug was discovered in the v1 contract, many thought the project was dead. But no, the team and community have been working diligently to bring the pro...
The Great Epicenter Host Extravaganza 2021
January 12, 2021 16:53 - 1 hour - 65.3 MBThe new year has brought with it a new bull run. This is great news for crypto holders, but at what cost? Will this bring with it a number of negative implications such as regulatory push back and privacy battles? Listen as the five hosts of Epicenter come together for an in-depth chat to share their predictions for the crypto space in 2021. Topics covered in this episode: Each of our hosts share how 2020 went for them In-depth individual predictions on where things are headed with the cu...
Eric Wall: Arcane Assets – The Future of Digital Investments
January 06, 2021 15:38 - 1 hour - 87.1 MBEric Wall is the Chief Investment Officer at Arcane Assets, but you may already know him from his writing and his presence on Twitter where he offers valuable insights on crypto markets. He joined us on the show to share with us his deep and timely insights into the current bull run and how this compared to 2017, where it is headed from here, and also he opens up on his normally guarded thoughts on the future of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Topics covered in this episode: Eric's background and ho...
The Path to Digital Democracy
December 29, 2020 13:56 - 47 minutes - 45 MBIn this digital age, counting ballots by hand, as recently seen in the US Presidential Election, is very analogue and behind the times. Although the US constitution is over two centuries old and hasn't had a major version update since 1992, European democracies are much more recent and utilizing the technology available today. This panel discussion looks at how open technologies and new systems of governance could be a path toward a future of democracy. We also hear about the avenues for i...
Rethinking the Justice System: A Digital Jurisdiction for Decentralized Organisations
December 22, 2020 15:01 - 44 minutes - 41.8 MBIn today's world, life and business is moving more into to a virtual space and this has of course been accelerated as a result of the Covid pandemic. Now more than ever it is important to rethink the very basis of how we organise, make decisions, and structure the world’s governance. And how can we do this in the context of crypto and Web3? Web3 infrastructure can provide the foundations of a digital jurisdiction. In the Web3 world rules are enforced by decentralized governance and DAOs all...
Leonard Tan & Yong Zhen Yu: The Decentralized Key Management and Login System for Web3
December 18, 2020 16:06 - 1 hour - 68.8 MBTorus is an open-source and universal key management system for the Web3 ecosystem. It's simple, secure and non-custodial, and suitable for anyone to manage their keys. Torus runs a Distributed Key Generation protocol built on Shamir's Secret Sharing. Supporting over a hundred thousand authentications a month on popular applications like AAVE, KyberSwap, Augur, GoodDollar, and MyCryptoHeroes, Torus empowers decentralised applications with seamless user onboarding flows while maintaining rec...
Hasu & Kain Warwick: Diving Deep Into Liquidity Mining
December 16, 2020 16:29 - 1 hour - 73.2 MBCrypto is largely reliant on incentive mechanisms, and liquidity mining is one of the more recent cryptoeconomic incentive models to emerge. When decentralized exchanges need liquidity, they can leverage liquidity mining to incentivize users to provide it. In turn, the “miners” generate revenue, generally in the form of a native tokens, proportional to their share of liquidity in a pool. This summer saw a surge in activity surrounding this concept, with Synthetix a notable player. Kain Warw...
Sandeep Nailwal: Matic – A Scalable Layer-2 Dapp Platform for Ethereum
December 08, 2020 17:54 - 1 hour - 49.4 MBMatic Network is a Layer-2 scaling solution that provides instant, low cost, and secure transactions on Ethereum. Built on an adapted implementation of Plasma and a decentralized network of Proof-of-Stake (PoS) validators, its goal is to solve the scalability and usability issues for developers building Dapps, whilst not compromising on decentralization and user experience. Sandeep Nailwal, COO & Co-founder of Matic, joins us to chat about how Matic works and the problems it's solving, and ...
Juan Benet: Protocol Labs – IPFS, Filecoin and the Vision for a Decentralized Web (Part 2 of 2)
December 01, 2020 18:16 - 1 hour - 45.2 MBFilecoin is a peer-to-peer network data storage network, with built-in economic incentives for storage providers. It facilitates open-markets for storing and retrieving data, in which anyone can participate. Users can pay the network to access storage space, which can be encrypted, replicated, and highly available. After years of development and iteration, Filecoin recently launched its mainnet. The long term vision of the protocol is a fully decentralized future for the web. Juan Benet, F...
IPFS, Filecoin and The Vision for a Decentralized Web (Part 1 of 2)
November 26, 2020 16:01 - 1 hour - 45.6 MBIPFS (InterPlanetary File System) is a fully decentralized distributed system for storing and accessing files, websites, applications, and data. Released just over 5 years ago by Protocol Labs, it has had a tremendous impact in the Web3 space as the standard for how blockchain projects store data. Filecoin is a complementary protocol to IPFS and was recently launched on the mainnet. Filecoin is the economic layer which powers IPFS's decentralized file storage network. It enables users to sto...
Trent McConaghy: Ocean Protocol – The Platform Making Waves in the Data Industry
November 19, 2020 15:27 - 1 hour - 46 MBData is a huge industry, worth about $500 billion in Europe alone. And currently there's a fundamental misalignment between those creating data and those consuming it. There's a one direction value flow in terms of those who are providing the value (the data) and those extracting it. These are big tech platforms that typically use that data to sell signals and advertising to brands and merchants. This is referred to as a shadow data economy and it's time to flip this model on its head. Ocea...
Martin Köppelmann: Circles – Creating Universal Basic Income Economies for Everyone
November 10, 2020 14:00 - 1 hour - 35.9 MBCircles UBI is a blockchain-based Universal Basic Income created to promote local economy within communities. It was recently launched on Ethereum’s POA network. The idea is to create a parallel economy by forming trust lines within Circles. Anyone who joins Circles receives a basic income regularly, without conditions. And the more connected your community is, the more valuable your Circles become. Also it is fully decentralized. What makes Circles special is that it doesn't market itself...
Alchemy – A Powerful Developer Platform and API for Ethereum Apps
November 03, 2020 16:39 - 1 hour - 38.5 MBAlchemy is a powerful blockchain developer platform providing a suite of developer tools. Developers building apps which interact with Ethereum can use Alchemy's powerful APIs to supercharge their apps, and leverage features not available in vanilla nodes. They also provide services like analytics, monitoring, alerting, logging and debugging. Today, a number of the top Dapps in the Ethereum ecosystem use Alchemy, and the company recently made their API available to the general public. We ch...
Sam Bankman-Fried: FTX & Project Serum – The World's First Decentralized Derivatives Exchange
October 27, 2020 15:00 - 1 hour - 36.4 MBAlameda Research is a quant trading fund founded in 2017. Today it manages over $100 million in digital assets and trades $600 million to $1.5 billion per day across thousands of products: all major coins and altcoins, as well as their derivatives. Whilst running this fund, the team thought there was space for a robust crypto derivatives exchange build for traders which solves some of the issues they saw in derivatives trading. FTX is the crypto derivatives trading platform which came out of...
Simon Polrot: Adan – Unraveling MiCA and the New Regulations Threatening Crypto in Europe
October 20, 2020 17:28 - 1 hour - 39.9 MBAdan (Association for the Development of Digital Assets), is an organization which helps promote the development of the crypto industry in France, and more broadly in Europe. Its President, Simon Polrot, is also the Co-founder Ethereum France, which host the EthCC conference in Paris. The European Commission has released a regulatory proposal, MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets), which falls under The Digital Finance Package. The Adan team have been working hard to understand, dissect and estab...
Kyle Samani: Multicoin Capital – The Thesis-Driven Cryptoasset Investment Firm
October 13, 2020 14:38 - 1 hour - 31.8 MBMulticoin Capital is a thesis-driven investment firm that invests in cryptocurrencies, tokens, and blockchain companies. They manage a hedge fund and a venture fund, investing across both public and private markets. They are extremely bullish on smart contract platforms and DeFi is one of their main areas of focus. They've invested in several projects and companies such as Algorand, Arweave, Nervos, Skale, Solana, to name a few. We originally had Multicoin on the show in February of 2018 w...
Ido Sadeh Man: Sögur – The Digital Coin Changing Global Currency for the Better (sponsored)
October 08, 2020 16:34 - 1 hour - 36.4 MBSögur, formerly known as Saga, aims to provide a global digital currency that acts as a store of value, a unit of account, and a medium of exchange. It is not impacted by any single nation state agenda and complements national currencies. And it is governed by its holders. The SGR is Sögur's digital coin. It's built to provide a self-sustaining, democratic and global currency. It uses a bonding curve market maker, which is modelled to control and mitigate volatility exposure and value loss ...
Demetri Kofinas: Uncovering the Hidden Forces of Today's Society
October 06, 2020 15:00 - 1 hour - 36.8 MBHidden Forces is a podcast devoted to exploring the underlying forces driving the most powerful changes we see in the world. Demetri Kofinas, host of the show, holds conversations with some of the most brilliant minds in technology, finance, social science, and the hard sciences. He consults blockchain and distributed ledger technology companies, and hedge funds and venture capital firms on how to invest in and around these same emerging technologies. We chatted to Demetri about a range of...
The Layer-1 Data Availability and Consensus Solution
September 29, 2020 16:15 - 1 hour - 35.4 MBNB: Since the recording of this podcast LazyLedger changed their name to Celestia. Celestia is a scalable general-purpose data availability layer for decentralized apps and trust-minimized sidechains. It is a minimal, viable blockchain which does time stamping and block ordering. Think back to Bitcoin in the early days, before Ethereum. Layer-2 systems were being built on top of Bitcoin and were leveraging Bitcoin’s consensus layer. This is what Celestia is doing, although it is purpose bu...
Camila Russo: The Defiant – Laying Bare the Story of Ethereum
September 22, 2020 14:49 - 1 hour - 47.8 MBCamila Russo is a financial journalist, starting her career writing for Chile's largest national newspaper. She then spent 8 years at Bloomberg covering the Argentine market from Buenos Aires, the European stocks from Madrid, and analysed macro emerging markets moves for the Markets Live blog in New York. She is the founder of the Defiant and recently wrote and released a book on the foundations of Ethereum, “The Infinite Machine”. This tells the story of how 19-year-old coding genius Vita...
MacLane Wilkison: NuCypher – Proxy Re-Encryption for Distributed Systems
September 15, 2020 06:19 - 1 hour - 48.4 MBNuCypher is a decentralized threshold cryptography network offering interfaces and runtimes for secrets management and dynamic access control. It provides cryptographic infrastructure for privacy preserving applications and it exists as a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain. They are currently in testnet but once launched you will be able to use NuCypher to carry out proxy re-encryption. Proxy re-encryption is a cryptographic method that allows you to delegate re-encryption of data to...
Tarun Chitra: Gauntlet – The Simulation Platform for Blockchain Protocols
September 09, 2020 15:09 - 1 hour - 33.7 MBGauntlet is a simulation platform for building financial models of blockchain protocols and applications. Their platform uses machine learning methods to simulate different environments with various user behaviors and see how the system holds up in those conditions. They perform analysis on things like core mechanisms to test for liveness, block propagation, and at higher layers like simulating markets. Their offering is complementary to security audits as their analysis goes beyond code fun...
Marek Olszewski & Rene Reinsberg: Celo – Towards Prosperity for Everyone
September 01, 2020 17:16 - 1 hour - 32.4 MBCelo has a clear mission - to build a financial system that creates the conditions for prosperity, for everyone. The Celo Foundation is a non-profit organization that supports the growth and development of the open-source, decentralized Celo Platform. Its aim is to build a flexible network of applications built on a blockchain to facilitate payments and remittances to people’s phone numbers. Guided by the Celo community tenets, the Foundation contributes to education, technical research, env...
Cory Doctorow: Reviving the Cypherpunk in All of Us
August 25, 2020 14:21 - 1 hour - 30.4 MBRepublic is an investment platform that allows anyone pretty much anywhere in the world, of any income and net worth, to invest in some of the best private equity startups. It allows regular people, not just a few wealthy accredited investors, to invest in highly vetted private startups, with as little as $10 or as much as $100,000 per investment. In the past, accredited investors were the only ones allowed to invest in startups through equity-based incentives. However the JOBS Act of 2016 ...
Ken Nguyen: Republic – Bridging the Gap Between Investing and Startups
August 18, 2020 22:01 - 1 hour - 31.6 MBRepublic is an investment platform that allows anyone pretty much anywhere in the world, of any income and net worth, to invest in some of the best private equity startups. It allows regular people, not just a few wealthy accredited investors, to invest in highly vetted private startups, with as little as $10 or as much as $100,000 per investment. In the past, accredited investors were the only ones allowed to invest in startups through equity-based incentives. However the JOBS Act of 2016 ...