Eric Wall is the Chief Investment Officer at Arcane Assets, but you may already know him from his writing and his presence on Twitter where he offers valuable insights on crypto markets. He joined us on the show to share with us his deep and timely insights into the current bull run and how this compared to 2017, where it is headed from here, and also he opens up on his normally guarded thoughts on the future of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Topics covered in this episode: Eric's background and how he g...
Jan 06, 2021•1 hr 33 min•Ep. 373
In this digital age, counting ballots by hand, as recently seen in the US Presidential Election, is very analogue and behind the times. Although the US constitution is over two centuries old and hasn't had a major version update since 1992, European democracies are much more recent and utilizing the technology available today. This panel discussion looks at how open technologies and new systems of governance could be a path toward a future of democracy. We also hear about the avenues for improve...
Dec 29, 2020•48 min•Ep. 372
In today's world, life and business is moving more into to a virtual space and this has of course been accelerated as a result of the Covid pandemic. Now more than ever it is important to rethink the very basis of how we organise, make decisions, and structure the world’s governance. And how can we do this in the context of crypto and Web3? Web3 infrastructure can provide the foundations of a digital jurisdiction. In the Web3 world rules are enforced by decentralized governance and DAOs allow fo...
Dec 22, 2020•44 min•Ep. 371
Torus is an open-source and universal key management system for the Web3 ecosystem. It's simple, secure and non-custodial, and suitable for anyone to manage their keys. Torus runs a Distributed Key Generation protocol built on Shamir's Secret Sharing. Supporting over a hundred thousand authentications a month on popular applications like AAVE, KyberSwap, Augur, GoodDollar, and MyCryptoHeroes, Torus empowers decentralised applications with seamless user onboarding flows while maintaining recovera...
Dec 18, 2020•1 hr 15 min
Crypto is largely reliant on incentive mechanisms, and liquidity mining is one of the more recent cryptoeconomic incentive models to emerge. When decentralized exchanges need liquidity, they can leverage liquidity mining to incentivize users to provide it. In turn, the “miners” generate revenue, generally in the form of a native tokens, proportional to their share of liquidity in a pool. This summer saw a surge in activity surrounding this concept, with Synthetix a notable player. Kain Warwick i...
Dec 16, 2020•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 370
Matic Network is a Layer-2 scaling solution that provides instant, low cost, and secure transactions on Ethereum. Built on an adapted implementation of Plasma and a decentralized network of Proof-of-Stake (PoS) validators, its goal is to solve the scalability and usability issues for developers building Dapps, whilst not compromising on decentralization and user experience. Sandeep Nailwal, COO & Co-founder of Matic, joins us to chat about how Matic works and the problems it's solving, and w...
Dec 08, 2020•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 369
Filecoin is a peer-to-peer network data storage network, with built-in economic incentives for storage providers. It facilitates open-markets for storing and retrieving data, in which anyone can participate. Users can pay the network to access storage space, which can be encrypted, replicated, and highly available. After years of development and iteration, Filecoin recently launched its mainnet. The long term vision of the protocol is a fully decentralized future for the web. Juan Benet, Founder...
Dec 01, 2020•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 368
IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) is a fully decentralized distributed system for storing and accessing files, websites, applications, and data. Released just over 5 years ago by Protocol Labs, it has had a tremendous impact in the Web3 space as the standard for how blockchain projects store data. Filecoin is a complementary protocol to IPFS and was recently launched on the mainnet. Filecoin is the economic layer which powers IPFS's decentralized file storage network. It enables users to store t...
Nov 26, 2020•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 367
Data is a huge industry, worth about $500 billion in Europe alone. And currently there's a fundamental misalignment between those creating data and those consuming it. There's a one direction value flow in terms of those who are providing the value (the data) and those extracting it. These are big tech platforms that typically use that data to sell signals and advertising to brands and merchants. This is referred to as a shadow data economy and it's time to flip this model on its head. Ocean Pro...
Nov 19, 2020•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 366
Circles UBI is a blockchain-based Universal Basic Income created to promote local economy within communities. It was recently launched on Ethereum’s POA network. The idea is to create a parallel economy by forming trust lines within Circles. Anyone who joins Circles receives a basic income regularly, without conditions. And the more connected your community is, the more valuable your Circles become. Also it is fully decentralized. What makes Circles special is that it doesn't market itself to an...
Nov 10, 2020•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 365
Alchemy is a powerful blockchain developer platform providing a suite of developer tools. Developers building apps which interact with Ethereum can use Alchemy's powerful APIs to supercharge their apps, and leverage features not available in vanilla nodes. They also provide services like analytics, monitoring, alerting, logging and debugging. Today, a number of the top Dapps in the Ethereum ecosystem use Alchemy, and the company recently made their API available to the general public. We chatted...
Nov 03, 2020•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 364
Alameda Research is a quant trading fund founded in 2017. Today it manages over $100 million in digital assets and trades $600 million to $1.5 billion per day across thousands of products: all major coins and altcoins, as well as their derivatives. Whilst running this fund, the team thought there was space for a robust crypto derivatives exchange build for traders which solves some of the issues they saw in derivatives trading. FTX is the crypto derivatives trading platform which came out of Ala...
Oct 27, 2020•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 363
Adan (Association for the Development of Digital Assets), is an organization which helps promote the development of the crypto industry in France, and more broadly in Europe. Its President, Simon Polrot, is also the Co-founder Ethereum France, which host the EthCC conference in Paris. The European Commission has released a regulatory proposal, MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets), which falls under The Digital Finance Package. The Adan team have been working hard to understand, dissect and establish ...
Oct 20, 2020•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 362
Multicoin Capital is a thesis-driven investment firm that invests in cryptocurrencies, tokens, and blockchain companies. They manage a hedge fund and a venture fund, investing across both public and private markets. They are extremely bullish on smart contract platforms and DeFi is one of their main areas of focus. They've invested in several projects and companies such as Algorand, Arweave, Nervos, Skale, Solana, to name a few. We originally had Multicoin on the show in February of 2018 when th...
Oct 13, 2020•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 361
Sögur, formerly known as Saga, aims to provide a global digital currency that acts as a store of value, a unit of account, and a medium of exchange. It is not impacted by any single nation state agenda and complements national currencies. And it is governed by its holders. The SGR is Sögur's digital coin. It's built to provide a self-sustaining, democratic and global currency. It uses a bonding curve market maker, which is modelled to control and mitigate volatility exposure and value loss when ...
Oct 08, 2020•1 hr 19 min
Hidden Forces is a podcast devoted to exploring the underlying forces driving the most powerful changes we see in the world. Demetri Kofinas, host of the show, holds conversations with some of the most brilliant minds in technology, finance, social science, and the hard sciences. He consults blockchain and distributed ledger technology companies, and hedge funds and venture capital firms on how to invest in and around these same emerging technologies. We chatted to Demetri about a range of curre...
Oct 06, 2020•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 360
NB: Since the recording of this podcast LazyLedger changed their name to Celestia. Celestia is a scalable general-purpose data availability layer for decentralized apps and trust-minimized sidechains. It is a minimal, viable blockchain which does time stamping and block ordering. Think back to Bitcoin in the early days, before Ethereum. Layer-2 systems were being built on top of Bitcoin and were leveraging Bitcoin’s consensus layer. This is what Celestia is doing, although it is purpose built an...
Sep 29, 2020•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 359
Camila Russo is a financial journalist, starting her career writing for Chile's largest national newspaper. She then spent 8 years at Bloomberg covering the Argentine market from Buenos Aires, the European stocks from Madrid, and analysed macro emerging markets moves for the Markets Live blog in New York. She is the founder of the Defiant and recently wrote and released a book on the foundations of Ethereum, “The Infinite Machine”. This tells the story of how 19-year-old coding genius Vitalik Bu...
Sep 22, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 358
NuCypher is a decentralized threshold cryptography network offering interfaces and runtimes for secrets management and dynamic access control. It provides cryptographic infrastructure for privacy preserving applications and it exists as a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain. They are currently in testnet but once launched you will be able to use NuCypher to carry out proxy re-encryption. Proxy re-encryption is a cryptographic method that allows you to delegate re-encryption of data to a th...
Sep 15, 2020•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 357
Gauntlet is a simulation platform for building financial models of blockchain protocols and applications. Their platform uses machine learning methods to simulate different environments with various user behaviors and see how the system holds up in those conditions. They perform analysis on things like core mechanisms to test for liveness, block propagation, and at higher layers like simulating markets. Their offering is complementary to security audits as their analysis goes beyond code functio...
Sep 09, 2020•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 356
Celo has a clear mission - to build a financial system that creates the conditions for prosperity, for everyone. The Celo Foundation is a non-profit organization that supports the growth and development of the open-source, decentralized Celo Platform. Its aim is to build a flexible network of applications built on a blockchain to facilitate payments and remittances to people’s phone numbers. Guided by the Celo community tenets, the Foundation contributes to education, technical research, environ...
Sep 01, 2020•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 355
Republic is an investment platform that allows anyone pretty much anywhere in the world, of any income and net worth, to invest in some of the best private equity startups. It allows regular people, not just a few wealthy accredited investors, to invest in highly vetted private startups, with as little as $10 or as much as $100,000 per investment. In the past, accredited investors were the only ones allowed to invest in startups through equity-based incentives. However the JOBS Act of 2016 creat...
Aug 25, 2020•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 354
Republic is an investment platform that allows anyone pretty much anywhere in the world, of any income and net worth, to invest in some of the best private equity startups. It allows regular people, not just a few wealthy accredited investors, to invest in highly vetted private startups, with as little as $10 or as much as $100,000 per investment. In the past, accredited investors were the only ones allowed to invest in startups through equity-based incentives. However the JOBS Act of 2016 creat...
Aug 18, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 353
SKALE Network's modular protocol is one of the first of its kind to allow developers to build application specific blockchains. These are interoperable and compatible with the Ethereum mainchain, and the entire Ethereum ecosystem. They provide the benefits of decentralization without compromising on computation, storage, or security. The focus of SKALE Network is slightly different to other scaling solutions, many of which we have had on the show in the past. SKALE Network aims to scale smart co...
Aug 11, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 352
Ampleforth is a cryptocurrency attempting to become an essential building block to an alternative financial ecosystem. The protocol’s native token, AMPL, is a non collateralized cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin, but with a twist: It is supply elastic. This means the token and protocol will automatically increase or decrease the quantity of tokens held in user wallets based on 24 hour weighted volume price. AMPL operates as an ERC-20 token on top of the Ethereum blockchain. Some claim that the Amplef...
Aug 04, 2020•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 351
Balancer is a generalized automated market maker (AMM) protocol built on Ethereum. It allows anyone to create or add liquidity to customizable pools and earn trading fees. On one side there are liquidity providers (LPs) that generally seek to balance their holdings, and they get rewarded with trading fees. On the other side, traders that are looking for the best rate possible. One way to look at Balancer is as a generalization of Uniswap, however Balancer pools aren't restricted to the same 50/5...
Jul 28, 2020•1 hr 33 min•Ep. 350
UMA, or Universal Market Access, is an open source financial contracts protocol for building synthetic assets. It allows any two counterparties to design and create their own financial contracts for derivatives. An example of these assets in the traditional finance world, are interest rate derivatives. These are used to hedge against fluctuations in currency exchange rates. Today, interest rate derivatives are commonly used and the contracts to create these are standardized. Similarly, UMA allow...
Jul 21, 2020•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 349
Numerai, the "hardest data science tournament on the planet". It's a hedge fund with its own distributed research platform designed specifically for AIs. It's the first of its kind and takes a radically different approach to making market predictions. It's completely crowd-sourced and data scientists around the world compete to create the best predictions and get paid with cryptocurrencies. Users are completely blind to the data and Numerai is blind to the code, and the predictive models users g...
Jul 14, 2020•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 348
Polkadot is a unique protocol connecting multiple purpose-built blockchains into one scalable network. It's using blockchain technology to make way for new markets and future decentralized economies and has many stand out features. It's a sharded multichain network enabling many transactions on several chains in parallel. It offers interoperability and cross-chain communication. Communities on Polkadot govern their own network, and hold a stake in the future of Polkadot’s network governance as a...
Jul 07, 2020•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 347
Just like all software, smart contracts on the blockchain are subject to serious security vulnerabilities and coding errors. The fact however that smart contracts are often directly in charge of assets and cannot be changed once they are on the blockchain, makes secure development and running essential. Some smart contract platforms have their own languages, for example Solidity in Ethereum. Bugs and vulnerabilities in the source code, and errors in the virtual machines used by the network, are ...
Jun 30, 2020•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 346
