Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies
583 episodes - English - Latest episode: 9 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
Jesse Powell: How Kraken Accelerates Cryptocurrency Adoption
November 13, 2019 05:14 - 1 hour - 71.3 MBAs the cryptocurrency space has grown, exchanges have become the dominant juggernauts of the industry. One of the earliest and most reputable exchanges is Kraken. From the company's formation in 2011, Kraken has grown to 4m users and almost 1,000 employees. We are joined by Kraken Founder and CEO Jesse Powell. We dove into the history of Kraken, their values and the vision that's driving them. Topics covered in this episode: How selling virtual goods for games led Jesse to discover Bitcoin...
Anatoly Yakovenko: Solana - Reaching for the Limits of Blockchain Performance
November 06, 2019 06:25 - 1 hour - 89.2 MBThe vision of a world computer on which anyone can deploy smart contracts has captured our imagination since the publication of the Ethereum whitepaper. But while Ethereum demonstrated the viability of the concept, its shortcomings in terms of capacity and throughput prevent it from realizing the vision. Today, throughput has become a major bottleneck for widescale adoption of decentralized technologies. Many projects have set out to deliver where Ethereum 1.0 falls short. Most projects, in...
Rhys Lindmark: MIT's Digital Currency Initiative – Why We Need Blockchain Ethics
October 29, 2019 15:29 - 1 hour - 66.7 MBBlockchain and cryptocurrencies have the potential to change the world in meaningful ways. And this change may drastically impact people’s lives – both for the better and for the worse. While ethics are often discussed for technologies like AI, the ethical considerations around blockchain technologies have received less focussed attention. We’re joined by Rhys Lindmark, Head of Community and Long-Term Societal Impact at the MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative. Previously the host of...
Eli Ben-Sasson: StarkWare – Productizing zk-STARKs to Provide Blockchain Scalability and Privacy
October 22, 2019 19:43 - 1 hour - 70.8 MBThis past year, we have witnessed what some are calling a “Cambrian Explosion” in zero-knowledge proof systems. New proof systems based on a variety of cryptographic assumptions are popping up every week. And while zero-knowledge systems are known for their privacy-preserving characteristics, they have proven particularly useful for scaling blockchains through off-chain computations. We're joined by Eli Ben Sasson, Co-founder and Cheif Scientist in the East at Starkware. His company is deve...
Yoni Assia: eToro – The Social Trading Platform
October 15, 2019 17:19 - 1 hour - 68.2 MBWe’re joined by Yoni Assia, Founder and CEO of eToro. The concept behind this world-leading social trading platform is users invest smarter by automatically copying the top traders in the community. With over 10 million users, over a trillion dollars traded on the platform just last year alone, this fascinating approach to trading is making huge waves. A decade after its original launch, eToro entered the crypto space with eToroX, their crypto exchange. More recently, they added cryptocurren...
DappCon 2019 – Tales of Governance: DAOs, Swarms and Anarchic Systems
October 08, 2019 19:38 - 45 minutes - 41.5 MBAs we take some time to record new interviews, we’re releasing content from DappCon which took place in Berlin in August. This week, you’ll hear a panel moderated by Sunny all about blockchain governance. The panelists where Ameen Soleimani of MolochDAO, Stephanie Hurder of Prysm Group, Jorge Izquierdo of Aragon One, and Sebastian Gajek of ditCraf. Topics covered in this episode: Hard Governance vs. Soft Governance What types of governance we should apply to different systems Different ...
DappCon 2019 – Look at My Flashy Colors And Rounded Corners!
October 02, 2019 07:52 - 53 minutes - 49.3 MBAs we take some time to record new interviews, we're releasing content from DappCon which took place in Berlin in August. This week, you'll hear a panel moderated by Sebastien on usability and user experience in blockchain-based apps and products. The panelists where Chriss Sugg of AirSwap, Alex Van de Sande of the Ethereum Foundation, Itamar Lesuisse or Argent and Pedro Gomez of Wallet Connect. Topics covered in this episode: The state of usability in the blockchain space How evolving t...
Omer Shlomovits & Ouriel Ohayon: ZenGo – The ‘Keyless’ Crypto Wallet
September 24, 2019 20:41 - 1 hour - 68.4 MBThose who have been in crypto long enough remember the not-so-good-ol’ days when an air-gapped machine was the only way to store private keys securely. Thankfully, the wallet space has come a long way from that era. But we still live in a world where the seed phrase is the single atomic point of failure. Enter threshold signatures schemes (TSS), a multi-party computation (MPC) where different parties generate a key and are all required to create a valid signature. We’re joined by Omer Shlo...
Sharon Goldberg: Arwen – Centralized Exchange Trading Without Counterparty Risk
September 18, 2019 07:30 - 1 hour - 65.8 MBWe're joined by Sharon Goldberg, CEO of Arwen, a protocol solution for non-custodial trading. From communications engineering to Internet protocol security, to then becoming a Professor at Boston University, she shares her journey into the world of cryptography. Beginning as a whitepaper on eclipse attacks, Arwen has grown into a platform enabling atomic swaps on centralized exchanges. Sharon chats about Arwen's integration with KuCoin, how it compares to ShapeShift, Interledger, and Lightni...
David Chaum: The Forefather of Cryptocurrencies and the Cypherpunk Movement
September 10, 2019 23:44 - 1 hour - 58.6 MBWe’re pleased to be joined by the legendary cryptographer and computer scientist, David Chaum. From his early beginnings at Berkley, David pioneered many of the cryptographic techniques used in secure systems and cryptocurrencies today. Blind signatures, which are used in zero-knowledge proofs, and mix networks, used in Tor heavily rely on his work. At the dawn of the Internet, David founded DigiCash, what many believe to be a direct ancestor of Bitcoin. Today, David continues to pursue his ...
Ayo Akinyele: Bolt Labs – Zcash on Lightning
September 03, 2019 16:53 - 1 hour - 59.7 MBWe're joined by Ayo Akinyele, CEO of Bolt Labs. Bolt is building a new privacy-focused layer-2 payment channel network design. Initially designed by Matt Green and Ian Meyers, Bolt is being commercialized by Ayo and his team. Beginning with a Zcash integration, they have plans to implement on several crypto networks. We chat with Ayo about the technical design of BOLT channels, their privacy guarantees, how they complement designs like Lightning, and their synergies with the Zcash team. Top...
Anthony Sassano & Eric Conner: EthHub – Ethereum Education and the Quest for Ether Dominance
August 27, 2019 18:25 - 1 hour - 91.7 MBWe’re joined by Eric Conner and Anthony Sassano, founders of EthHub. Started in January of 2019, EthHub’s goal is to provide a trusted, objective source of information for the Ethereum ecosystem. The platform is made up of an open-source documentation website, a weekly newsletter, and a podcast, “Into the Ether” hosted by Eric and Anthony. Both active and vocal members of the Ethereum community, they are known to embody what some consider to be Ethereum Maximalism. Topics covered in this ep...
Dan Shin: Terra – The Stable Currency Tackling the Ecommerce Payments Market
August 20, 2019 18:58 - 1 hour - 62.6 MBThis week we're joined by Daniel Shin. He is the Co-Founder of Terra Money and previous CEO and Co-Founder of TMON, one of Korea's largest players e-commerce platforms. Today he talks about his success in that area and how that drove him to enter the cryptocurrency and blockchain space with this new project. Daniel was lead to blockchain when looking for a solution to reduce transaction fees paid by online merchants. Not satisfied with just using an existing stable coin, he set about to mak...
Erik Voorhees: ShapeShift – There's a New Fox in Town
August 13, 2019 14:00 - 1 hour - 72 MBWe’re joined by Erik Voorhees, Founder & CEO of Shapeshift. His third appearance on the podcast is timed nicely as July marked ShapeShift’s fifth anniversary. From its early days as the “Google Translate for cryptocurrencies”, it has grown into an organization of 75 people, and Erik talks about the learning curves he has endured on his journey. Our conversation also coincides with the launch of ShapeShift’s brand new V2 platform, which includes a self-custodial asset management dashboard, ha...
Igor Barinov: POA Network – Enabling Scaling Through Trust in Public Notaries
August 06, 2019 21:39 - 1 hour - 62.3 MBWe're joined by Igor Barinov, the tech lead of the POA Network. The POA Network achieves a reduction in transaction costs by many orders of magnitude by having a set of trusted validators. All validators must be US public notaries, so their identities are known and legal recourse against them can be taken in the offchain world. We also talk about the xDai network, which enables Dai transactions on a POA chain: Dai are transferred into a smart contract on the mainnet and then become available...
Rune Christensen: Maker DAO – The Central Bank of Web 3.0
July 30, 2019 17:49 - 1 hour - 78.4 MBWe're joined by Rune Christensen, CEO and Co-Founder of MakerDAO. We discuss the rise of Maker DAI as an algorithmically backed stable token and get into the weeds of the new version featuring multi collateral DAI as well as the ability to natively generate interest on DAI. We also cover the current governance model and how this can be attacked. The governance will undergo an overhall for the new version of Maker, introducing an Emergency Shutdown that can be triggered through MKR holders an...
Ameen Soleimani: Moloch DAO – A Simple Yet Unforgiving DAO to Fund Ethereum Development
July 24, 2019 18:55 - 1 hour - 71.4 MBWe’re joined by Ameen Soleimani, Co-founder and CEO of SpankChan. From his humble beginnings at ConsenSys, he went on to create SpankChain in 2017 at the height of the ICO boom. The project aims to create a better and safer environment for sex workers by removing the intermediaries who take significant commissions on their revenues. SpankChain’s initial product, an adult cam platform, allows users to pay performers in crypto with a native asset over sophisticated payment channels. More recen...
Jerry Brito: The Case for Electronic Cash in an Open and Free Society
July 16, 2019 20:16 - 1 hour - 64 MBWe’re joined by Jerry Brito, Executive Director of Coin Center. Having discovered Bitcoin in 2011, Jerry was among the first lawyers to talk about crypto in the U.S. capital. In 2014, he founded Coin Center, a leading research and advocacy center focussing on cryptocurrencies. In this enlightening conversation, we talk to Jerry about his paper titled “The Case for Electronic Cash,” in which he articulates why private peer-to-peer payments are essential to an open society. We also discuss Li...
Robert Leshner: Compound – An Automated Money Market for Ethereum Tokens
July 09, 2019 15:42 - 1 hour - 58.8 MBIn this episode, we caught up with Robert Leshner, founder of the Compound protocol. Compound is a fascinating smart contract protocol, running atop Ethereum, that allows users to lend and borrow specific ERC-20 tokens with a duration-free interest model. The protocol acts as a central borrower and lender of user tokens and algorithmically prices the interest charged to borrowers and lenders. Compound is one of the first examples of a well-functioning lending market built using smart contrac...
Rob Dawson: PegaSys – Enterprise-Grade Ethereum Protocol Engineering
July 04, 2019 12:32 - 1 hour - 57.1 MBWe're joined by Rob Dawson, Head of Product at PegaSys. PegaSys is the protocol engineering spoke of ConsenSys, and the team building Pantheon, a Java implementation of the Ethereum client. The Pantheon client was built from the ground up as both a mainnet, and consortium chain client. Written in Java with an Apache 2.0 license, it benefits from being easily accessible to enterprises, who predominantly use that language. The PegaSys team has built additional features into the Pantheon client...
Stephen Palley: The Regulatory Landscape for Cryptocurrencies and the SEC's Case Against Kik
June 25, 2019 22:25 - 1 hour - 67.2 MBThe complex and evolving regulatory landscape for cryptocurrencies has been a topic for many years. After a long period of waiting, the SEC started pursuing fraud causes in the last 1-2 years. But the recent lawsuit against Kik is the first time that the SEC goes after a large, non-fraud case. We were joined by lawyer Stephen Palley to discuss the Kik case, the US regulatory landscape and recent announcement of the Libra cryptocurrency promoted by Facebook. Topics covered in this episode: ...
Bonus 2/2: Cosmos Validator Panel and Governance Debates – Interchain Conversations Berlin
June 21, 2019 07:26 - 1 hour - 77.4 MBThis is part two of a two part bonus series. These sessions were recorded at the first Interchain Conversations conference which took place in Berlin on June 13th and 14th, 2019. The firs part of this bonus episode features the validator panel moderated by Brian Fabian Crain, Co-founder of Chorus One. The panel included Florian Liss of Staking Facilities, Hendrik Hofstadt of Certus One, Aurel Iancu of Dokia Capital, and Jun Soon Kim of stake.fish. The conversation goes into the role of vali...
Bonus 1/2: “Epicenter Live” and a Chat with Jae Kwon of Cosmos – Interchain Conversations Berlin
June 21, 2019 07:25 - 1 hour - 87.8 MBThis is part one of a two-part bonus series. These sessions were recorded at the first Interchain Conversations conference which took place in Berlin on June 13th and 14th, 2019. The first part of this episode is “Epicenter Live,” a live podcast recorded on stage at the event. It features hosts Meher Roy, Sunny Aggarwal, Brian Fabian Crain, and Sebastien Couture. In this conversation, we discuss the topic of blockchain interoperability. We look at how different projects address interoperabi...
Hayden Adams: Uniswap – An Automated Decentralized Exchange for Ethereum
June 18, 2019 18:36 - 1 hour - 66.4 MBThe concept of a decentralized exchange has been a holy grail in the cryptocurrency space for many years. Many attempts have been made, but most decentralized exchanges suffered from central points of failure, poor user experience and little liquidity. Launched during Ethereum's DevCon 2018, Uniswap is one of the first fully decentralized exchanges and managed to become the leading DEX very fast. We were joined by Uniswap Founder Hayden Adams to discuss Uniswap's unique model, the different...
Tal Moran: Spacemesh – The Space-Time Consensus Blockchain
June 11, 2019 16:56 - 1 hour - 66 MBWe're joined by Tal Moran, Chief Scientist at Spacemesh. This new consensus protocol is designed to run on home desktop PCs, filling free space on users' hard drives to create a Proof of Space-Time. The goal of this new blockchain protocol is to solve the issues with Proof of Work and Proof of Stake, that is, energy inefficiency on the one hand, and possible centralized plutarchy of rich validators on the other. Topics covered in this episode: Tal's background as an academic and researcher...
Dominic Tarr: Secure Scuttlebutt – The “Localized” but Distributed Social Network
June 04, 2019 18:21 - 1 hour - 66.3 MBWe’re joined by Dominic Tarr, a sailor, and the Founder of Secure Scuttlebutt. This curiously named project has a fascinating approach to creating a truly distributed social network. One might even say that Secure Scuttlebutt is “localized” as it gracefully degrades to Sneakernet, something few blockchain projects can claim. In actuality, the SSB protocol isn’t a blockchain in the traditional sense – each user’s feed acts as a sort of localized chain of posts, signed by their public key, and...
Dan Robinson: Rainbow Network – Off-Chain Synthetics Exchange or “Multicolored Lightning”
May 28, 2019 16:51 - 1 hour - 66.7 MBWe’re joined by Dan Robinson, a research partner at Paradigm, and the author the “Rainbow Network” paper. The paper describes an off-chain decentralized synthetics exchange which leverages payment channels. The Rainbow Network is based on the idea that “rainbows are basically just multicolored lightning,” borrowing from the concepts used in the Lightning Network. The protocol relies on trusted oracles and allows participants to trade any type of liquid asset off-chain. All that is necessary ...
Jill Carlson: Open Money Initiative – Free Access to Finance as a Human Right
May 22, 2019 17:39 - 1 hour - 80.4 MBA common meme in the cryptocurrency space is that it has the potential to help people in countries where only the rich and powerful access to global financial markets. But ten years after the Bitcoin white paper was released, just how many “unbanked” people has cryptocurrency helped? Some see crypto as a tool to empower vulnerable populations in places where hyperinflation and strict capital controls make day-to-day survival a nearly impossible challenge. We’re joined by Jill Carlson. Previ...
Aya Miyaguchi: The Role and Challenges of the Ethereum Foundation
May 16, 2019 17:09 - 51 minutes - 47.4 MBThe Ethereum Foundation has played a crucial role in the evolution of the blockchain ecosystem. They pioneered the Swiss foundation structure and ran one of the first token sales. They played a key role in developing the second-most valuable blockchain network and still play a key role in funding research and steering the future of Ethereum. At the same time, it has been frequently criticized for a lack of transparency, being too slow in funding development and poor financial risk managemen...
Mark Miller: Agoric and the Decades-Long Quest for Secure Smart Contracts
May 07, 2019 21:47 - 1 hour - 64.2 MBWe were joined by Mark S. Miller, Chief Scientist at Agoric. Mark is a computer scientist who has done ground-breaking work on many topics relevant to blockchain and smart contracts going back decades. We discussed his visionary 1988 Agoric papers, which explored how markets could be applied to the world of software. We also covered how his view of smart contracts, which focused on secure bilateral agreements complements and converges with blockchain. Finally, we covered his new company Ago...
Mike Pieciak: NASAA – A “To The Moon” Approach to Regulating Crypto
April 30, 2019 18:06 - 1 hour - 71 MBWe're joined by Mike Pieciak, President of the NASAA. Not to be confused with the space agency, the North American Securities Administrators Association brings together state, provincial, and federal securities regulators in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. This relatively unknown organization helps align the financial regulation policies of over 50 agencies across North America and coordinates enforcement action in cross-border cases. In 2018, the NASAA launched “Operation Cryptosweep...
Griff Green: Giveth – Creating the New Economic Model of Giving
April 23, 2019 18:37 - 1 hour - 74.3 MBWe're joined by Griff Green, one of the founders at Giveth. The organization, which emerged out of the ashes of the DAO, aims to create a better model for charitable work. Operating as a Dapp, Giveth aims to bring new governance models in the nonprofit space. The goal is to create better incentives for donors and charity workers, in all types of social good projects. Topics covered in this episode: Griff's background as a gold-hodling digital nomad His time spent at Slock.it and his invol...
Yaniv Tal: The Graph – A Marketplace for Web3 Data Indexes Based on GraphQL
April 16, 2019 15:11 - 1 hour - 67.2 MBAt the core of the Web 2.0 stack lies the REST API. It's the fiber which allows frontend applications to communicate with their backend counterparts, as well as the services on which they depend. But the API model is highly constrained and inflexible. The API is divorced from the data model, which creates a number of restrictions and inefficiencies. Most blockchain clients, including Geth, Parity and Bitcoin Core, use a JSON-RPC model which suffers from similar issues. Several Ethereum DApps...
Simon de la Rouviere: Bonding Curves, Curation Markets, Token Curated Registries… and Art
April 10, 2019 12:05 - 1 hour - 74.8 MBHuman beings have a penchant for creating lists. We make lists for things like the top music artists at any given time, the best restaurants in the world, companies which people can trust, and the most wanted criminals. Lists take many forms. They can be maintained by a single authority, or curated by a crowd. But almost always, they remain in the custody of a central party. Token Curated Lists propose a model by which a) the content of lists are decentralized, and b) contributors are incent...
Ethan Buchman & Sunny Aggarwal: Cosmos – Launching the Internet of Blockchains
April 03, 2019 19:34 - 1 hour - 79.6 MBThe shipping container brought standardization to the way we move goods around the world. Similarly, TCP/IP packets normalized how information transits over computer networks. Today, blockchains remain siloed ecosystems and interoperability is practically non-existent. A new wave of third-generation blockchain protocols aims to change this. In this new paradigm, blockchains communicate natively and value moves seamlessly from one network to another. One of those projects is Cosmos. We’re jo...
Jackson Palmer: Dogecoin – wow! so meme. such community. very charity. much story.
March 27, 2019 07:52 - 1 hour - 74.9 MBDogecoin was born from the association of two browser tabs: one was an article about the popularity of the doge meme, and the other, CoinMarketCap. The idea quickly gained traction on Twitter, and before long, a new cryptocurrency was born. Dogecoin gained adoption as a tipping currency, the community took part fundraising for charities and other causes, perhaps most notably sending the Jamaican bobsled team to the Sochi Winter Olympics. We’re joined by Jackson Palmer, co-creator of Dogecoi...
Brian Hoffman & Washington Sanchez: OpenBazaar – Growing a Permissionless Marketplace
March 19, 2019 18:29 - 1 hour - 83.6 MBIn the early days of Bitcoin, much of the community’s focus was around payment and getting merchants to adopt cryptocurrencies. Although the technology and narratives have evolved, some projects continue to embrace that original vision of peer-to-peer business, where merchants and their customers interact directly, and if they so wish, anonymously. We’re joined by Brian Hoffman and Washington Sanchez of OpenBazaar. Since we last interviewed Brian in 2015, the project has grown to become a m...
Daniel Lehnberg & Michael Cordner: Grin – Cypherpunk Mimblewimble
March 12, 2019 20:41 - 1 hour - 75 MBThree years ago, a mysterious txt file signed by a pseudonymous Tom Elvis Jedusor was dropped in the Bitcoin-Wizards IRC channel outlining a proposal called Mimblewimble. It proposed a novel way of combining many ideas from Bitcoin research in order to create a new blockchain protocol that will be highly scalable and increase privacy, while still using the same cryptographic assumptions as Bitcoin. A few months later this project was picked up by another pseudonymous individual who started w...
Amaury Séchet: Bitcoin Cash – Part 2
March 05, 2019 16:47 - 1 hour - 64.8 MBAmaury Séchet is the lead developer of Bitcoin ABC, the largest client for the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. Amaury first got started with Bitcoin in 2010 and closely followed the Bitcoin block size debate as it progressed through the early years of Bitcoin. Predicting the eventual failure of SegWit2x, Amaury was part of the original team that helped coordinate the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, timing it with the activation of SegWit on the main Bitcoin blockchain. We discuss with Amaury the roadmap fo...
Amaury Séchet: Bitcoin Cash
February 28, 2019 16:09 - 1 hour - 73.8 MBAmaury Séchet is the lead developer of Bitcoin ABC, the largest client for the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. Amaury first got started with Bitcoin in 2010 and closely followed the Bitcoin block size debate as it progressed through the early years of Bitcoin. Predicting the eventual failure of SegWit2x, Amaury was part of the original team that helped coordinate the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, timing it with the activation of SegWit on the main Bitcoin blockchain. We discuss with Amaury the roadmap fo...
Ben Goertzel: SingularityNET – The Global AI Network and Marketplace
February 20, 2019 11:10 - 1 hour - 76.7 MBArtificial Intelligence is often misunderstood. And much like blockchain, those who fiercely stand by the technology believe it will change the world for the better. Others fear the negative repercussions it could bring it and would rather see it disappear. We’re joined by Ben Goertzel. Ben’s interest in AI and robotics date back to his childhood and he has made these his life-long passion and work. He is the CEO of SingularityNET, a company building a marketplace for AIs which leverages bl...
Alexey Akhunov: Ethereum 1.x – BUIDLing Things One Step at a Time
February 13, 2019 12:22 - 1 hour - 73.3 MBWe’re joined by Alexey Akhunov, an independent Ethereum researcher. Alexey has been working on an ambitious project called TurboGeth. As the name implies, it is a version of Geth which features a number of speed and performance optimizations. Alexey also leads the state rent working group of the Ethereum 1.x project. Ethereum 1.x came out of Devcon when core developers began to realize that the full migration to Serenity would likely take several years. The team hopes to bring progressive i...
Christian Decker: Lightning Network – The Road to Scaling Bitcoin
February 07, 2019 21:51 - 1 hour - 74.7 MBWhen the Lightning Network (LN) was conceived in 2015, it was quickly embraced by the Bitcoin community as the way to dramatically scale Bitcoin’s capacity. There was an expectation of LN being available quickly. Instead, development proceed more slowly in the background with different teams contributing to a standard specification. That spec is now almost ready and last year interest and early activity on the LN increased dramatically. We were joined by Christian Decker, a core engineer at...
Jameson Lopp: On Being a Professional Cypherpunk
January 30, 2019 00:19 - 1 hour - 78.2 MBWe’re joined by Jameson Lopp. Jameson is the CTO of Casa, a company providing key storage solutions. Previously, he was an early engineer at BitGo. However, to most people, he is perhaps known for his Twitter presence and his excellent writing. Over the years, Jameson has written extensively about Bitcoin development, cryptocurrencies, and personal operational security. A self-proclaimed “Professional Cypherpunk,” aligns with the ideas of libertarianism and volunteerism. Topics covered in t...
Martin Köppelmann & Matan Field: How the dxDAO could become the world’s largest organization
January 24, 2019 22:00 - 1 hour - 82 MBThe concept of DAOs has been captivating to many in the crypto space for years. When “The DAO” was created in 2016, in the few weeks of its existence and despite obvious flaws, it gather tremendous momentum and amassed 14% of the entire ether supply. Since then the technology has matured and Martin and Matan argue that the time for DAOs has finally arrived. We were joined by DAOstack Founder Matan Field and Gnosis Founder Martin Köppelmann. We talked about the decentralized exchange protoco...
Looking Back on 5 Years of Epicenter
January 15, 2019 19:28 - 55 minutes - 51.2 MBEpicenter turned 5 years old this month – that’s a long time in the blockchain space! When the podcast began in January 2014, the entire ecosystem was made up of only Bitcoin and a handful of altcoins. Soon after, the Ethereum white paper was published which ushered in a new era of crypto assets and decentralized applications. Since then, we have released 270 episodes and interviewed some of the leading thinkers, entrepreneurs, and engineers in the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry. Nee...
Joseph Lubin: ConsenSys – The Distributed Incubator which Jumpstarted the Ethereum Ecosystem
January 08, 2019 18:34 - 1 hour - 61.4 MBWe’re joined by Joseph Lubin, Founder and CEO of ConsenSys. Joseph founded ConsenSys as an Ethereum development studio on the heels of the Ethereum crowd sale in 2014. The company has since grown to a distributed organization of over 1,000 people. Over 50 companies and projects have emerged from ConsenSys, including Metamask, uPort, Gnosis, and GitCoin, to name only a few. Today, the company continues to invest in growing the Ethereum ecosystem by funding projects, and through consulting ser...
Andy Bromberg: CoinList – Capital Formation for the Crypto Industry
January 01, 2019 17:16 - 1 hour - 62.4 MBWhen token sales and ICOs took off in 2017, most projects chose to push ahead despite large regulatory risks. One of the few that went the other direction and put compliance first was CoinList. The platform made its debut by running the massive Filecoin token sales in which $205m was raised from accredited investors. CoinList also played a major role in popularizing the SAFT and creating tools to efficiently and legally raise in the US. We were joined by CoinList President and Co-founder An...
Nadav Hollander: Dharma – A protocol for tokenized debt
December 25, 2018 18:38 - 1 hour - 58.2 MBLending is one core pillar of the economy, enabling one person or company to be entrepreneurial with someone else’s capital. However, in the traditional banking system processes in lending are often opaque and the barrier to entry into this market is high. The emergence of easy to use Decentralized Finance is one of the hallmarks of 2018: To date, DeFi has brought us crypto-collateralized stable coins, decentralized exchanges, tokenized credit default swaps, trustless derivatives, and decent...
David Andolfatto: The Impact of Central Bank Digital Currencies on the Banking Sector
December 18, 2018 14:33 - 1 hour - 71.5 MBSince the rise of digital currencies and cryptocurrencies, central banks are considering the role these new forms of money may play in our evolving digital economy. One of the ideas studied is the notion of a central bank digital currency. While people and companies can hold central bank liabilities in the form of cash, only licensed banks have access to digital cash accounts with central banks. We’re joined by David Andolfatto, VP of Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. David...