Nexus Mutual provides an alternative decentralized insurance solution for Ethereum. The protocol is built on the public chain and operates under a discretionary mutual structure meaning it is owned wholly by its members. It allows anyone to become a member and buy cover, and the model encourages engagement as members receive incentives for participating in Risk Assessment, Claims Assessment and Governance. At present the product offered is cover to protect against hacks in smart contract code. W...
Jun 23, 2020•1 hr•Ep. 345
Opyn is a smart contract-based insurance platform built on a generalized (supports both put and call) options protocol called Convexity. It is intended as a platform to protect DeFi users against both technical and financial risks, and a place where ETH holders can earn substantial premiums on their holdings by providing insurance. Opyn uses tokenized ERC20 put options, oTokens, on ETH to allow option buyers to keep their upside while limiting their downside. If you buy Opyn protection, you are ...
Jun 17, 2020•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 344
In late 2017, Gabriel Jimenez was approached by the Venezuelan presidency and asked to create a national digital currency, the Petro. Although very much against the regime, Gabriel saw this as a chance to save his country which was on the brink of economic collapse. A new currency that would move freely over an open network, like Bitcoin. And the government would not be able to control it. So he agreed. Things didn’t go as Gabriel had envisioned. Months later, Gabriel almost paid with his life w...
Jun 10, 2020•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 343
We've heard it over and over again, Covid-19 has plunged us into a crisis like none other we’ve experienced in our lifetime. Although it is primarily a public health issue, it is also having a major impact on the global economy and financial system. Many businesses have been forced to shut down sparking debates on whether this is supply or demand shock. Wall Street proclaims that any increase in economic activity is a good sign. However, Jim Bianco, President and Macro Strategist at Bianco Resea...
Jun 02, 2020•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 342
In this inaugural post-interview chat, Friederike and Sebastien discuss their recent interview with Arweave Co-founder and CEO, Sam Williams. Moving forward, these conversations will be released every week on Substack. Subscribe to never miss an episode at https://epicenter.rocks/substack
May 28, 2020•13 min
The internet was originally created as a platform to communicate freely, but it soon became a place where people could be monitored, controlled, and censored. 98% of content on the internet is deleted every 20 years. More surprisingly, based on a Twitter study, a third of links change their content fundamentally or are removed completely, within three months of their creation. Arweave is a new data storage protocol that enables economically sustainable permanence for the very first time. Built o...
May 26, 2020•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 341
Today, half of the internet is built on top of Amazon S3. Although the cloud has allowed Internet applications to scale, centralized infrastructure means less control over one's own data. And when it goes down, so does half of the internet. Sia CEO David Vorick is back on the podcast to talk about a new product recently released by their team: Skynet. Skynet builds on Sia and enables web applications to be developed and deployed over a decentralized data storage infrastructure. David also shares...
May 22, 2020•55 min
Decentralized exchanges have been around for some time, and various designs have been attempted. Although they provide a number of privacy and censorship resistance benefits, one of their pitfalls has been transaction throughput. However, recent advancements in Zero-Knowledge Proof-based scaling solutions is creating a new breed of scalable DEXes. Loopring is a non-custodial DEX protocol that achieves high-throughput trading. It leverages ZK-Rollups to achieve upwards of 2,000 transactions per s...
May 19, 2020•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 340
Julian Assange, the creator of WikiLeaks, is currently in a maximum-security prison in London facing extradition to the US for violating the Espionage Act. This charge came, among other things, from exposing US war crimes in Iraq. This has put journalists around the world under fear of being prosecuted for exposing the truth. Opinions on Julian Assange are divided, unsurprisingly. But we can assume that a conviction would set a dangerous precedent for journalism, free press, and freedom of speec...
May 12, 2020•59 min•Ep. 339
Genesis Mining is a leading hash power provider offering cloud cryptocurrency mining as a service. They offer mining for Bitcoin, Zcash, Dash, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Monero and serve over 2 million users in 100+ countries. The company was formed in 2013 and saw tremendous growth in its seven years in operation. In the mining business, process optimization, controlling costs, and vertical integration are key. Crypto prices, difficulty adjustments, hardware availability – all can have an impact o...
May 05, 2020•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 338
Aave is building a suite of non-custodial DeFi tools that allow users to earn interest on their deposits and borrow assets. Earlier this year, Aave released its Flash Loans feature, which is drumming up a lot of excitement in the ecosystem. Flash Loans have a number of applications like executing liquidations or refinancing and require no collateral on the part of the borrower. As we have seen since they were introduced, they have also been used by malicious actors to exploit vulnerabilities in ...
Apr 28, 2020•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 337
The Plasma Group was a not for profit research group focussing on layer-2 scaling on Ethereum. Optimism is a new Public Benefit Corporation that builds on the lessons of the Plasma research and is implementing Optimistic Rollups. This solution scales Eth 1.x and offers near-instant transaction finality on Ethereum, while providing over 100x transaction throughput. Jinglan Wang and Karl Floersch, co-founders of Optimism, explain the transition to this new entity and its goals moving forward. Topi...
Apr 21, 2020•1 hr•Ep. 336
AZTEC Protocol is a protocol that enables private transactions on Ethereum. At its core, AZTEC is an Ethereum contract, otherwise known as the AZTEC Cryptography Engine. The protocol uses a zero-knowledge proof system, allowing users to effectively create shielded representations of tokens, which can then be sent and redeemed for the underlying token. CEO and CTO, Tom Pocock and Zac Williamson have plans to build AZTEC into a fully functional DeFi stack with which all kinds of trades, swaps, and...
Apr 14, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 335
Ryan Sean Adams is the Founder of Mythos Capital, a crypto fund and staking provider for “big fish” stakeholders. He also writes the popular DeFi newsletter, Bankless. In addition to providing excellent insights about the ecosystem, Bankless takes a very practical approach to leveraging DeFi. Ryan shares strategies and encourages readers to complete action items to utilize the full potential of decentralized finance and become bankless. He also hosts a podcast by the same name with David Hoffman...
Apr 07, 2020•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 334
In another of our bonus episodes recorded at EthCC in Paris, we caught up with Jason Goldberg, CEO and Founder of Pepo and Ost, and James Dyer, Co-founder and Head of Product at Decrypt. At the time of recording Decrypt were about to announce they were launching their own token that rewards audience engagement, built on Ost technology. We chatted to Jason and James about this relationship, the problems solved by these monetization models, the link between Pepo and Decrypt tokens, and DeFi, and w...
Apr 02, 2020•1 hr 2 min
What will the World look like when capital is no longer scarce? In his book, World After Capital, Albert Wenger makes the case that technological progress throughout the ages (foraging, agrarian, industrial) brought a change in scarcities. As society transitions from the Industrial Age to the Age of Knowledge, scarcities will also shift – human attention will become our most valued scarce resource. Albert Wenger is a Managing Partner at the VC firm Union Square Ventures. A graduate of Harvard an...
Mar 31, 2020•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 333
We caught up with Joseph Lubin, Founder of ConsenSys, at this year's EthCC. It has been over a year since he last came on the show, and we wanted to get his take on what has been happening in the ecosystem since then. We talked about the ConsenSys reorganization, interoperability between public and permission blockchains and the opportunities there, government-backed stable coins and the possibilities of nation-states building their own, DeFi and the phenomenal growth in the ecosystem, his predi...
Mar 26, 2020•47 min•Ep. 333
In this episode we are joined by David Hoffman, Chief of Operations at RealT, a company which tokenizes realestate assets into security tokens. He is also well known for numerous pieces he has written on Ethereum and DeFi and is co-host of the POV Crypto podcast. Hear us as we talk about his writings, how tokenizing real estate assets works, Bitcoin on Ethereum, the feedback loop problem and effects of the USD in DeFi, and a debate on whether Ether is an asset. Topics covered in this episode: Wh...
Mar 24, 2020•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 332
This week we have a special episode on the entire globe's most talked about topic, the Corona Virus. We are joined by guest Ryan Selkis, CEO of Messari. Ryan was one of the first people in the space to start talking about Covid19 and has been very vocal on this subject on Twitter and his newsletter since the crisis began in January. We discuss how this virus has become so deadly and the current health and economic conditions, containment and protecting yourself, how the markets, crypto and start...
Mar 17, 2020•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 331
This episode was recorded at the third annual Ethereum Community Conference in Paris last week and we were joined by Gonçalo Sá, Co-founder of ConsenSys Diligence, Jérôme de Tychey, President of Ethereum France, and Cassidy Daly, Token Designer at Centrifuge. We discussed the issues surrounding centralization and DeFi in token governance, the security complexities of composability attacks like the ones we saw recently which leveraged flash loans, and of course, the coronavirus. Topics covered in...
Mar 13, 2020•44 min
We are joined by founder of TQ Tezos, Jacob Arluck. TQ Tezos is a company that works to advance the Tezos ecosystem by creating open source software and other public goods. It's been over two years since we last did an episode about Tezos and this was a good refresher on how that project is shaping up. We hear about the decentralized and permissionless nature of the Tezos infrastructure, the protocol development of Tezos, and how TQ is working to make Tezos more accessible. Topics covered in thi...
Mar 10, 2020•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 330
Joe Lallouz is the CEO of Bison Trails, who provide staking infrastructure for a variety of PoS blockchains. They have built a really impressive system for deploying nodes across multiple cloud services. In light of the $25m recently raised by Bison Trails, Joe shares their vision to build a better PoS ecosystem for everyone, the types of customer they run validators for, and the cutting edge stuff they're working on in terms of deployment, redundancy and key storage. We also hear their view on ...
Mar 03, 2020•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 329
Income tax. Not a particularly exciting topic, especially when it comes to paying them. But something we all need to deal with nevertheless. We are all (or at least should be) aware of what our personal tax returns entail. But are you fully aware of the implications holding crypto can have on your tax filing? Clinton Donnelly, Founder of CryptoTaxAudit has done hundreds of tax returns for US citizens, both domestic and expatriated, and is an expert when dealing with filing crypto and Bitcoin tax...
Feb 28, 2020•46 min
Gabriel Shapiro is an independent attorney who has spent the last two years focusing on the tokens and crypto. He has published several pieces diving deep into US Securities Law, in which he shares his vision and philosophy for how Tokenized Networks should be regulated. In light of the recent “safe harbor” framework proposed by SEC Commissioner Hester Pierce, Gabriel offers his thoughts and suggests how these measures could be improved in a way that would benefit the entire industry. Topics cov...
Feb 25, 2020•1 hr•Ep. 328
Decentralized finance (DeFi) is continuing on its remarkable path to the broad adoption of permissionless financial services. While many people celebrated passing $1 billion locked in DeFi products at the start of February 2020, only a week later, an additional $200 million had entered the ecosystem. DeFi products thus far have proven useful to early adopters with the resilience and knowhow required to navigate the often clunky user experience of Web 3.0. Companies like Argent are building the i...
Feb 18, 2020•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 327
While recent blockchain launches seem to leverage various Proof of Stake consensus mechanisms, some believe Satoshi’s consensus mechanism is optimal for distributed protocols. As decentralized ledgers jockey to become the chain of choice for enterprises looking to leverage blockchain technology, projects are looking to offer a solution that maximizes security, decentralization, and transaction throughput. Kevin Wang, a Co-founder of Nervos, joins us to discuss why Proof of Work was implemented a...
Feb 11, 2020•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 326
Like previous crypto winters, those actually building the ecosystem have been working diligently to create applications with industry-changing potential. The year 2020 may prove to be the year of Decentralized Finance (DeFi), with many exciting projects re-creating financial products common to the world of traditional finance, in the open and permissionless blockchain space. Synthetic assets enable exposure to the price action of an asset without actually holding the underlying asset. Kain Waric...
Feb 04, 2020•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 325
Many within the cryptofinance industry have been patiently waiting for regulatory oversight to deliver the clarity required for institutional adoption. Recent updates by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which issues guidelines for 200 countries and territories, attempts to apply the same rules and regulations required of traditional finance to the world of virtual currencies. Yaya Fanusie's background as an intelligence analyst at the CIA, and research on the national security implication...
Jan 28, 2020•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 324
The blockchain trilemma is the generally accepted concept that it's not possible to scale public and permissionless blockchains without compromising on security, decentralization, or both. While the industry seems focused on building Layer 2 solutions to scale the transaction capacity of public networks, Algorand believes it has solved the trilemma, offering a network that scales without compromise to security or decentralization. Silvio Micali, Algorand's Founder and Head of Research, as well a...
Jan 21, 2020•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 323
Governance within any community has been a work in progress for humanity's history. The blockchain ecosystem continues to develop and offer an alternative to today's centralized powers. With this, distributed projects and technologies will need to enact clear governance to ensure viable competition with the streamlined decision-making processes present in today's institutions. The absence of codified governance in Bitcoin may be one of its most significant traits, signaling to the world its pred...
Jan 15, 2020•59 min•Ep. 322
