Nasdaq is one of the largest and most well known financial institutions in the World. As the second-largest stock market by market capitalization, Nasdaq is also one of the leading software companies in capital markets, providing its Nasdaq Financial Framework to exchanges all around the globe. Fredrik Voss, VP of Blockchain Innovation at Nasdaq, joins us to discuss how Nasdaq is leveraging blockchain technologies to propel itself into the future. Having invested in Chain and Stratumn, Nasdaq is...
Oct 04, 2017•57 min•Ep. 203
For many years, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies were regarded as little more than a nerdy curiosity by the financial world. But with the rise of Bitcoin and Ethereum, the process of cryptocurrencies becoming a recognized asset class has begun. One person at the forefront of this transformation is Ari Paul. Previously a portfolio manager at the University of Chicago’s $8 billion endowment, he recently left to start the cryptocurrency hedge fund BlockTower Capital. He joined us for an insightful conv...
Sep 26, 2017•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 202
Enterprise consortium blockchains have gained a lot of interest in recent months. And although we can see many applications for this particular type of network deployment, many questions remain to be answered before these systems can move to production. Issues related to scaling, network deployment, access controls and key management remain open at this point. With its deep roots in the enterprise, Microsoft hopes to have answers to these questions. Matt Kerner, Partner GM for Blockchains at Azu...
Sep 19, 2017•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 201
In the past year, the first killer application of blockchain technology has emerged: venture funding. As blockchain-facilitated crowdfunding is disrupting venture capital at blistering speed, we are joined by Ciaran O’Leary, Founder and General Partner at BlueYard. BlueYard stands at the intersection of this transition. Structured as a traditional VC fund, its thesis focuses fully on the decentralized economy and it invests in tokens too. Ciaran joined us to discusses what blockchain means for V...
Sep 13, 2017•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 200
Scalability and interoperability are two of the main issues facing blockchain protocols today. In a future in which entire industries and economies rely on distributed technologies, it is unclear how blockchain networks will support massive amounts of data, and exchange transactions in a trusted way. Peter Czaban, co-founder of Polkadot, joins us as we dive deep into the Polkadot Network. Polkadot is a heterogeneous multi-chain network, consisting of many connected chains (or parachains), all of...
Sep 05, 2017•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 199
Nick Morgan, a former attorney at the SEC, joined us to discuss their recent report on the DAO and what it means for the ICO boom. Topics covered in this episode: The history and mandate of the SEC Nick’s years as a trial attorney at the SEC How the Howey Test is used to determine if something is a security The application of the Howey Test to the DAO case The weaknesses in their argument that token holders relied on the effort of others Why the SEC did not prosecute the Slock.it founders Why th...
Aug 29, 2017•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 198
After Bitshares and Steemit, Dan Larimer’s latest project EOS has also gathered lots of attention. Their record-setting crowdsale has already raised $300m and is continuing for another year. Dan joined us to discuss his journey in the industry, what connects the different projects, how EOS works and how the EOS crowdsale works. Topics covered in this episode: A history of Dan’s previous projects Bitshares and Steemit How Dan knows when the time has come to move to the next project Why they descr...
Aug 23, 2017•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 197
Prior to hosting his ground breaking podcasts Beyond Bitcoin and The Ether Review, Arthur Falls had left his home country of New Zealand to fish lobster off the coast of Maine. Like many people in the blockchain space, his unlikely journey into the world of decentralized technologies is a fascinating one, and he shares it with us in this episode. Arthur recently traveled to over a dozen locations around the World, conducting interviews for an upcoming documentary. He shares what he learned and h...
Aug 17, 2017•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 196
We’re joined by Loi Luu, Co-founder of KyberNetwork. This new decentralized exchange protocol, built on Ethereum, aims to match buyers with reserve operators, who create liquidity for crypto-asset pairs. Trades occur instantaneously and without the need for a trusted third party exchange operator. Topics covered in this episode: Loi’s background and involvement with various projects such as TrueBit, Smart Pool, and Oyente The desirable features of a decentralized exchange Other decentralized exc...
Aug 09, 2017•1 hr•Ep. 195
Bancor is a simple, but hard-to-understand protocol that enables price discovery and liquidity even for assets that aren’t actively traded. Co-Founder Eyal Hertzog joined us to explain how the Bancor protocol works and why they think it will play a key role in enabling a massive wave of small, but interconnected user-generated currencies. We dissected the workings of the protocol, its radical implications as well as the takeaways from their record-shattering, but controversial crowdsale. Topics ...
Aug 04, 2017•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 194
Dave Collins and Jake Yocom-Piatt join us to talk about Decred, a cryptocurrency which introduces an innovative system of community-based governance into its blockchain. Decred implements a hybrid Proof of Work and Proof of Stake system in which miners validate transactions, while users can vote on new features and upgrades to the protocol. This clever approach enables efficient blockchain governance, which has demonstrated to be successful in a recent protocol upgrade on the live network. Topic...
Jul 26, 2017•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 193
Hebrew University academics Aviv Zohar and Yonatan Sompolinski joined us to discuss their research at the forefront of blockchain technology. We talked about their early proposals for scaling Bitcoin using the GHOST protocol, which later inspired Ethereum. And then we discussed SPECTRE and a new type of network based on directed acrylic graphs (DAG). DAGs abandon the blockchain data structure to allow constant generation of blocks that later get merged achieving block times of seconds and throug...
Jul 19, 2017•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 192
Numerai Founder Richard Craib joined us to discuss his radical project to build a hedge fund with network effects. Numerai manages its portfolio by giving its data in encrypted form to data scientists who compete to create the best predictions and get paid with cryptocurrencies. Numerai expects to radically alter the structure of the hedge fund and asset management industry. Topics covered in this episode: How hedge funds work and what trends effect them Quantitative trading and the role of AI i...
Jul 11, 2017•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 191
Shapeshift CEO Erik Voorhees joined us to discuss his journey in the industry, the evolution of the decentralized exchange Shapeshift and their latest project Prism. We spent most time diving into the mechanics and enormous potential of Prism. Prism allows users to create a portfolio of digital assets that is purely managed on the Ethereum blockchain and illustrates how blockchain-based financial products can be built. Topics covered in this episode: Erik’s journey in the blockchain space from S...
Jul 04, 2017•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 190
After years of what has seemed like an endless debate, bitcoin may be at a crucial turning point in its relatively short lifetime. The question network scalability has divided the community into several factions which are seemingly irreconcilable. However, in just a few weeks, the future of bitcoin may be decided as miners and users throw their support behind one of many proposals to propel the bitcoin network into a new era. Bitcoin Developer and Principal Architect at Paxos, Jimmy Song, joins ...
Jun 27, 2017•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 189
Token sales, often called Initial Coin Offerings (ICO), are exploding in popularity. Seemingly each week a new record is hit with huge sums being raised by alpha-stage projects in almost no time. William Mougayar, an investor, author and blogger, who has been at the forefront of the token sale movement joined us to unpack the most dynamic trend in the blockchain ecosystem. We cover the great promise of token sales in disrupting venture capital and changing how startups are build and grown. We al...
Jun 20, 2017•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 188
With most of the world’s computing power concentrated in Internet companies’ data centers, the Internet has become a very centralized place. The Golem project aims to build the sharing economy of computing power. This “global, open sourced, decentralized supercomputer” will function thanks to the combined power of a massive network of machines, from personal laptops to whole data centers. We’re joined by Julian Zawistowski and Alex Leverington, CEO and P2P engineer at Golem. We discuss how Golem...
Jun 14, 2017•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 187
Our regulatory expert Siân Jones joined us to discuss her work on a regulatory framework for distributed ledger technology (DLT) for Gibraltar. We discuss how the framework differs from other efforts and aims to attract rather than curtail blockchain businesses. We also covered why the rapid changes require the flexibility of a principle-based approach to regulation. Finally, we discussed current trends around ICOs and how they could be impacted by regulation. Topics covered in this episode: How...
Jun 07, 2017•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 186
The saying goes: if you’re not paying for it, it’s likely that you’re the product. And with the rise of targeted ads, user behavior tracking, and alike, more and more users are turning to ad blocking software to protect their privacy and improve their browsing experience. In the last 25 years, the content monetization and Internet advertising industries have evolved to become complex ecosystems with multiple intermediating layers between users, publishers, and advertisers. This has created a sit...
May 30, 2017•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 185
Data is the new oil, and those who control massive amounts of it have a major competitive advantage. That advantage becomes exponential when that data is used to teach artificial intelligence. Companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon have a far greater probability of building strong AI than smaller actors simply by the sheer amount of user data and metadata they possess. Let’s now envision an alternate reality where big data lives on public infrastructure and is accessible to anyone who wis...
May 23, 2017•1 hr 35 min•Ep. 184
Naming systems are an important component of any networked information system. It’s difficult to imagine how the Internet could have been adopted by the masses had it not been for the Domain Name System, which translates machine-readable IP addresses into human-readable domain names. Blockchains, with their long and complex address formats, suffer from a similar problem. One might think a solution would be to apply the same naming system architecture we have for the public Internet to public blo...
May 16, 2017•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 183
Coin Center is a non-profit in Washington DC that focuses on research and advocacy issues facing public blockchain networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Their aim is to protect users and foster innovation through achieving sound policies and regulations. Director of Research Peter Van Valkenburgh joined us to discuss the work of the center and the most pressing regulatory issues facing the industry today. Topics covered in this episode: The origins and objectives of Coin Center How to judge the su...
May 09, 2017•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 182
The road to mainstream adoption of blockchain technologies is a long one. Although the user experience of wallets has greatly improved since the dark days of command-line only interfaces, decentralized applications continue to struggle with onboarding non-technical users. Jarrad Hope and Carl Bennetts, join us to discuss Status, a mobile Ethereum client which aims to turn the standard wallet experience on its head. At its core, Status is a mobile instant messenger client that leverages the Whisp...
May 02, 2017•57 min•Ep. 181
Anyone who has ever started a company knows just how tedious that process that can be. Whether it’s establishing a shareholder’s agreement, defining the company’s constitutional structure, raising funds, or transferring shares, corporate governance procedures remain largely paper-based, requiring validation from multiple stakeholders, and their lawyers. Blockchain technologies, and specifically smart contracts, provide the rails upon which these processes can be digitized and streamlined, reduci...
Apr 25, 2017•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 180
Years into the great Bitcoin scaling debate no solution is in reach. Neither bigger blocks nor Segregated Witness have anywhere near consensus support. With the conflict escalating, a Bitcoin fork has become a real possibility. Electrum Developer Thomas Voegtlin joined us to discuss the state of the Bitcoin scaling debate. We discussed Bitcoin Unlimited, ASICBoost, SegWit activation without miner support and how a Bitcoin fork could play out. Possible outcomes include that Bitcoin Unlimited gain...
Apr 18, 2017•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 179
For decades, science and academia have leveraged distributed computing to solve massive computational problems. Distributed grid computing schemes allow donors to volunteer their desktop computer’s idle resources toward scientific projects in physics, biology, and chemistry, where large amounts of parallel computing resources are necessary. Relying on software like BONIC, these networks provide features such as built-in fault tolerance and result verification. And with the proliferation of mobil...
Apr 11, 2017•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 178
Bitcoin and Ethereum miners collectively make up what is perhaps the most powerful computational resource in the world. However, mobile phones from the early 2000’s could arguably run more complex operations than these networks combined. While blockchains themselves may never reach the level of computational power of modern computers, they may be leveraged as the underlying verification layer for centralized computing. We’re joined by Jason Teutsch and Christian Reitwiessner. They are the co-aut...
Apr 04, 2017•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 177
In the world of Bitcoin podcast, there is one show which definitely stands out as the longest running, Let’s Talk Bitcoin! In its 4-year history, the show has produced over 320 episodes and expanded to become a network of podcasts which includes Epicenter and many others. We’re joined by Adam B. Levine the founder and host of Let’s Talk Bitcoin! It was thanks to Adam that Sébastien and Brian first connected in 2013, so in many ways, we consider him as the “”spiritual grandfather”” of Epicenter. ...
Mar 28, 2017•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 176
For a long time the native asset of the Ripple network XRP was the cryptocurrency with the second biggest market cap. But with much of the supply controlled by Ripple, it remained surrounded by controversy. Still, XRP remains an interesting asset to enable cross-border payments in the future. Miguel Vias recently joined Ripple after a long career on Wall Street to develop XRP as a liquid and widely accepted asset. Topics covered in this episode: How Miguel Vias went from trading precious metals ...
Mar 21, 2017•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 175
In the footsteps of the finance industry, the energy sector has been caught by the blockchain fever. Conceived over a century ago, increased usage and an explosion of devices have made energy grids outdated. Smart grids offer a two-way dialogue where electricity and information are exchanged between utilities and its customers. This new grid takes advantages of connected devices and green energy production to provide more reliability, security and sustainability. Carsten Stöcker, Senior Manager ...
Mar 14, 2017•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 174
