Long regarded as an impending black swan, Tether has successfully weathered out the contagion and bank runs caused by Luna’s collapse in the depths of the 2022-2023 bearmarket. Since then, a large portion of Tether’s reserves has been shifted to treasury bills, which are the closest dollar proxy, positioning Tether among the top 20 holders of T-bills, worldwide. However, navigating the Tether FUD was not the first rodeo for Paolo Ardoino, as he has also previously led Bitfinex, which successfull...
Apr 25, 2024•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 545
What 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-lik...
Apr 18, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 544
One 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 customisabl...
Apr 11, 2024•52 min•Ep. 543
Classical, 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: Impress...
Apr 06, 2024•58 min•Ep. 542
Market 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 in b...
Mar 30, 2024•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 541
Credit 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 addresses ...
Mar 23, 2024•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 540
While 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 link...
Mar 16, 2024•58 min•Ep. 539
As 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 order...
Mar 09, 2024•55 min•Ep. 538
Blockchains 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...
Mar 02, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 537
The 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 settin...
Feb 23, 2024•55 min•Ep. 536
Prolonged 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 outc...
Feb 17, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 535
Measuring 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 hurdle...
Feb 10, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 534
We 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 (and d...
Feb 03, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 533
The 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, to dis...
Jan 27, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 532
Web2 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 constant...
Jan 19, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 531
Fully 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 ...
Jan 12, 2024•59 min•Ep. 530
What 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 development an...
Jan 06, 2024•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 529
As 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 cent...
Dec 30, 2023•1 hr 31 min•Ep. 528
10 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 anniversar...
Dec 23, 2023•2 hr 25 min•Ep. 527
gnosis.io Unlike 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 discreet ...
Dec 16, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 526
When 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, chai...
Dec 09, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 525
With 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 by Ma...
Dec 01, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 524
Homo- (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 homomorphic e...
Nov 24, 2023•59 min•Ep. 523
"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 EVM-com...
Nov 18, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 522
Leading 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 knowledge ...
Nov 10, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 521
The 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 chains,...
Nov 04, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 520
While 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 promise o...
Oct 27, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 519
Stablecoins 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 decentral...
Oct 20, 2023•53 min•Ep. 518
One 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 Metamask ...
Oct 13, 2023•58 min•Ep. 517
Back 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 come...
Oct 06, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 516
