While L2 rollups did help scale Ethereum, they also created siloed ecosystems, all fighting over the same liquidity, users and devs. t1 Protocol is building layer-2 infrastructure to achieve seamless cross-rollup interoperability through real-time proving, powered by TEEs. t1's low-latency with 1-second block times provides faster preconfirmations, significantly improving UX, all while maintaining full Ethereum composability. Topics covered in this episode: Can’s background Why Enigma/Secret Net...
Jun 27, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 605
As the summer tour of European crypto conferences landed in Berlin, one of crypto’s cradles, we couldn’t miss DappCon 25, where we got to sit with Jerome de Tychey, Nixorokish & Joshua Dávila to discuss Ethereum’s restructure and whether its culture is still relevant to the wider crypto community. Join us for a fascinating discussion on the impact of crypto politicization and how Ethereum’s ecosystem evolved amidst a society with ever-changing values. Topics covered in this episode: Jerome, ...
Jun 20, 2025•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 604
Bitcoin remains an untapped source of net-new liquidity that could be injected into DeFi. This would completely reshape Bitcoin’s utilization from a mere store of value to a liquid asset that can be ported cross-chain and traded like a liquid staking derivative. Lombard’s LBTC builds upon Babylon’s Bitcoin staking primitive and aims to unlock new yield sources for the industry’s leading asset by increasing its DeFi utilization. Topics covered in this episode: Jacob’s background Lessons gathered ...
Jun 16, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 603
Apart from incentivising market participants to secure the network through inflationary rewards, many consider staking as an equivalent of stock dividend yield. As a result, although Bitcoin is regarded as digital gold, protocols are looking for ways to increase its utilisation in DeFi and, ultimately, generate yield. Nowadays, while newer networks are struggling to attract investors and sustain a healthy, decentralised validator set, more established blockchains capture the lion’s share of PoS ...
Jun 06, 2025•55 min•Ep. 602
After a decade of existence, Ethereum has gone a long way from its initial whitepaper, yet many efforts in scaling and finding product-market-fit have been severely criticized for falling short of their promise. However, despite numerous other ‘Ethereum killers’ being launched over the years, none has managed to attract so many developers and liquidity while sticking true to ethos that (once) powered and united this industry. This year’s ETHPrague plans to confront exactly these existential chal...
Jun 02, 2025•1 hr•Ep. 601
We couldn’t miss the Avalanche Summit where we sat down with Emin Gün Sirer, co-founder & CEO of Ava Labs, to discuss the evolution of Avalanche’s ecosystem and how HyperSDK ushers in a scalable, interoperable, multi-chain future. Join us for a fascinating discussion on Avalanche’s approach to decentralisation, scalability & interoperability, and learn why real-world applicability relies heavily on bespoke blockchain solutions. Topics covered in this episode: Gün x Epicenter bromance How...
May 26, 2025•32 min•Ep. 600
Blockchain architecture is constantly being forced to adapt to new technologies, as well as to meet new demands from users and builders. While the idea of apps building their own chains was first explored by Cosmos, it lacked the support and tooling to see it succeed. Later on, rollups also took the centerstage of Ethereum’s scaling roadmap, but due to their general purpose design, it led to a cannibalistic ecosystem. Initia learned from these 2 models and combined the best of both worlds: it bu...
May 16, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 599
As society evolves, so do its values and principles, but is that desirable for technology that seeks to build the most reliable, trustless and censorship resistant global settlement layer? Ever since the rise in popularity of Solana with its inflow of retail capital in a memecoin gold rush, Ethereum became even more criticized for sticking true to its core values despite the completely divergent demands of market participants. Moreover, the rollup centric scaling roadmap seemed to further silo a...
May 11, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 598
Taiko is a decentralized, Ethereum-equivalent (type I) rollup scaling solution which uses ZK technology. Taiko's goal is to scale Ethereum efficiently while maintaining security and decentralization. Being a type I zkEVM, Taiko retains full Ethereum equivalence, which creates a seamless DevEx, although this comes at the expense of UX as slower proof generation is the main trade-off. Moreover, in order to stay true to its decentralised ethos, Taiko operates as a based rollup, meaning that transac...
May 07, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 597
Founded by former Meta Diem team members, Sui is a high-performance, layer-1 blockchain designed for horizontal scaling and low-latency transactions. It uses an object-centric data model and the Move programming language to enable transaction parallelization which can handle >200,000 txs/s. Sui’s goal is to combine the benefits of blockchains with Web2’s security & frictionless UX. From account abstraction & ZKLogin, to on-chain storage & data availability solutions like Walrus, S...
Apr 29, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 596
With an extensive experience in traditional money markets, Maple Finance was envisioned as an institutional capital marketplace which combines the transparency & capital efficiency of blockchains with the regulatory framework of TradFi. Unlike many DeFi protocols that require over-collateralized loans (e.g. Aave), Maple also specializes in under-collateralized lending, enabling greater capital efficiency for institutional borrowers. With over $6b in loans since its inception, Maple plans to ...
Apr 25, 2025•55 min•Ep. 595
Tally is a software platform designed to support tokenized organizations, particularly Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and crypto communities. It provides tools for launching tokens, governing protocols, and enabling staking to foster community participation and growth. Tally facilitates onchain governance, allowing transparent and decentralized decision-making for managing funds, grants, and protocol upgrades. It powers major blockchain ecosystems like Arbitrum, ZKsync, Uniswap DA...
Apr 17, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 594
Namechain is an L2 developed by ENS Labs, to enhance the scalability and efficiency of managing decentralized identities on Ethereum. It is designed to work in tandem with ENS V2, which introduced a hierarchical registry system for more efficient subdomain management and custom resolvers. A key vision for Namechain is to unify multi-chain user identities, creating a "digital identity chain" that simplifies how users interact with the broader blockchain ecosystem. This is achieved through feature...
Apr 09, 2025•49 min•Ep. 593
Ethereum’s transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake created a unique set of conditions (i.e. lack of protocol-level delegation, 32 ETH requirement, long exit queues, etc.) that led to Lido’s liquid staking model to gain huge traction, significantly eclipsing other LSD providers on native PoS chains. stETH added on-demand liquidity, bypassing withdrawal windows, while also increasing DeFi utilization and increasing yields. Moreover, by allowing users to stake any amount of ETH in pools, it...
Apr 01, 2025•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 592
While DeFi’s ultimate goal is to provide an alternative for TradFi, blockchain gaming caters to retail masses, onboarding millions of users to crypto through incentives and fun gameplay. The greatest success story in Web3 gaming thus far has been, without a doubt, Axie Infinity. Apart from creating an engaged community whose early adopters also experienced rags-to-riches stories, it kickstarted an entire movement around play-to-earn gaming. Many have tried copying it, yet most of them failed. Ax...
Mar 27, 2025•55 min•Ep. 591
Solana needs no introduction. Ever since its inception, it pushed throughput scaling on a single chain, without the need of sharding or rollups. Despite its ups and downs that culminated at the bottom of the bear market after the FTX crash, it managed to not only survive, but build a vibrant community around crypto's (arguably) most prominent PMF (thus far). Join us for a fascinating discussion and learn about Anatoly's take on controversial topics such as MEV, concurrent block leaders (the equi...
Mar 15, 2025•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 590
Bitcoin’s security and reliability as a store of value are undeniable. However, its liquidity remained untapped for too long due to a lack of trustless bridges and native smart contract capabilities. As BTC is only native to Bitcoin’s L1, any attempt to include it in DeFi relies on the trust assumptions of third party custodians that wrap it. Build On Bitcoin (BOB) aims to expand Bitcoin’s functionality by integrating it with Ethereum’s smart contract capabilities. BOB operates as an OP Stack L2...
Mar 10, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 589
In the digital networked age, people’s attention often overlooks local problems in favour of global ones, which don’t necessarily impact them in their daily lives, or over which they don’t have a say due to the skewed Pareto distribution of power in modern day societies. Puja Ohlhaver, in her recent research paper ‘Community currencies’, proposes a dual-currency model that prices attention and influence in each community, with the ultimate goal of creating a Gaussian distribution of power, eithe...
Mar 01, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 588
Even though current LLM providers usually charge flat rates regardless if the subscriber is a ‘power user’ or not, as AI agents become the workhorses of the online economy, a dynamic AI-to-AI payments infrastructure would prove crucial for proper remuneration. Nevermined proposes a blockchain-agnostic, AI-agnostic credit system, that each builder can use to implement custom pricing strategies for their users. As the next trillion transactions will be mostly performed by AI agents, a universal pa...
Feb 25, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 587
As more and more protocols compete for marketshare, user acquisition represents one of the most important elements of the GTM strategy. Web3 projects, through their governance tokens, can incentivise users directly to participate in meaningful activities for each protocol, subsidising their revenue generation through vested upside in the project. Turtle Club built the first distribution protocol of Web3, helping its users maximise their rewards they get for meaningful on-chain activities that he...
Feb 17, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 586
As online content becomes predominantly AI-driven, intellectual property (IP) rights should not be neglected as (human) creators will heavily rely on them. While the main use cases for blockchains revolve around financial applications, one could argue that our everyday lives constantly intersect IPs in different forms. Although the legal framework is abundant, proper recording, monetization and disputes are often a burden for independent creators. Story Protocol aims to create a decentralised fr...
Feb 07, 2025•59 min•Ep. 585
While AMMs (automated market makers) represent a DeFi innovation in themselves, research and experimentation have pushed the possibilities well beyond the limitations of the classic x*y=k constant product formula originally used by LPs. One of the main innovators in this field remains Balancer - from multi-token pools with different weights replicating TradFi indices, to dynamic ratios that can be changed under certain conditions preventing further imbalances, Balancer set in place user protecti...
Jan 31, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 584
Kiln operates as a staking-as-a-service platform, primarily focused on Ethereum, enabling users to stake assets programmatically, managing validators, rewards, and commissions through an API-first approach. In addition, it offers white-label solutions that allow institutional clients to integrate staking functionalities into their own offerings, with unified API for all assets and rewards, making it easier for businesses to provide staking services without developing the infrastructure themselve...
Jan 23, 2025•1 hr•Ep. 583
Throughout the years, there were many attempts of tapping into Bitcoin’s liquidity and security, but almost all of them came with different caveats. Most notably, wrapped BTC (wBTC) depended on the wrapper contract security. However, the recent surge in research and development for native solutions has led to breakthroughs previously thought impossible. Babylon launched native BTC staking and plans to further expand this to secure other blockchains, in a model similar to that of mesh security. T...
Jan 14, 2025•50 min•Ep. 582
The DeFi landscape has significantly evolved since 2018 when Chainlink was launched. Recent developments such as L2 rollups, liquid staking, restaking and the rise of BTC DeFi have created huge demand for more customizable, modular oracles that would be able to provide accurate data for countless use cases, crosschain. RedStone set out to do exactly that and are now securing over $6.6 bn worth of assets (1000+ assets), across more than 60 chains, without a single mispricing event. Topics covered...
Jan 08, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 581
Traditional KYC and AML regulations have often forced companies to comply, without having the right tools to do so. Simply storing users’ personal information led to the creation of security honeypots which haven’t gone unnoticed by hackers. Web3 solutions like Privado ID aim to cryptographically prove certain traits from a user’s personal data, without disclosing it to the enquirer. This is usually made possible through zero knowledge proofs which allow users to store their personal data on the...
Jan 01, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 580
One of the most limited blockchain resources is blockspace. From Bitcoin’s Blocksize Wars to Ethereum’s scaling roadmap, a common denominator seems to have emerged in the form of rollups. Advancements in zero knowledge proofs have enabled trustless bridges, which are a cornerstone to onboarding liquidity to any blockchain. Furthermore, Celestia’s modular approach to blockchain architecture and their recent commitment to gigabyte blocks of data availability marked the beginning of commoditization...
Dec 24, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 579
The status quo for developers choosing an ecosystem for their blockchain usually revolves around trade-offs: do they go for Ethereum’s network effect, liquidity and decentralisation, or sacrifice some features in favour of a higher throughput. Monad aims to combine the best of both worlds, while not being limited by excessive hardware requirements. Monad built an EVM-compatible L1 from the ground up, completely rethinking execution and consensus, in order to achieve the infamous 10,000 TPS. This...
Dec 18, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 578
Polynomials are quintessential in machine learning for establishing relationships between outputs and inputs. However, there is also a field in cryptography which could not be made possible without polynomials - zero-knowledge technology. In zero-knowledge proof systems, computations are often represented as arithmetic circuits, and these circuits are translated into polynomials. This process is crucial for generating proofs that can demonstrate the correctness of computations without revealing ...
Dec 11, 2024•49 min•Ep. 577
Bitcoin’s Taproot update paved the way for a new & exciting era for Bitcoin, as it expanded its use case far beyond that of an immutable ledger. However, Ordinals, BRC-20 tokens and, more recently, Runes, have limited functionality compared to what DeFi is capable of, on other smart contract blockchains. BitcoinOS envisions a revolutionary Bitcoin economy that stems from truly programmable tokens, unlocking staking, governance and many other use cases. Using BitSNARK and Grail, BitcoinOS ena...
Dec 03, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 576
