This weeks podcast episode is with Mona El Isa , the co-founder of Melon , a decentralized asset management protocol. Mona tells the story of how she started her career at Goldman Sachs trading equities, derivatives, and all kinds of financial instruments, for a decade. She then went to work with one of Goldman’s hedge fund clients, where she managed a long-short portfolio. With all that experience and $20 million dollars from a seed investor, she ventured on her own to launch a hedge fund —but ...
Nov 23, 2020•51 min•Season 4Ep. 1
In this week’s episode, I speak with Illia Polosukhin, cofounder of the Near Protocol and Fernando Martinelli, co-founder and CEO of Balancer Labs . Near is one of the up and coming Layer 1 chains, Balancer is a prominent DeFi protocol and application on Ethereum that will now also be on Near and other blockchains. As for Near being labeled an “Ethereum Killer” Illia says Near is “not trying to kill anybody.” He thinks finance is just a stepping stone for all the use cases enabled by blockchains...
Nov 16, 2020•1 hr 11 min•Season 3Ep. 10
In this week’s interview, I speak with Sam Bankman-Fried , co-founder and CEO of crypto liquidity provider Alameda Research and derivatives exchange FTX, and with Anatoly Yakovenko , the creator of the Solana blockchain. Bankman-Fried, recently announced the launch of Serum, a DEX built on the Solana blockchain. SBF has become known to be a ruthless trader, but he argues he’s simply using DeFi protocols for what they were made. For Anatoly, the end goal of Solana is to find the fastest and cheap...
Nov 09, 2020•1 hr 17 min•Season 3Ep. 9
This week’s interview is with Trevor McFedries , who is behind Lil Miquela , a 19-year-old aspiring pop star with almost 3M Instagram followers, striking deals with Clavin Klein and Prada. But what’s more surprising is that she’s not human. She’s a computer-generated, character. The company that Trevor co-founded, called Brud, created her image and life story. It’s only fitting then that Lil Miquela, who lives in a digital world, will start to leverage digital tokens. [Note: Trevor says in the i...
Nov 02, 2020•50 min•Season 3Ep. 8
The founder of Summa speaks to The Defiant about why he has become disillusioned with decentralized finance. Stories of financial inclusion are much rarer than stories of somebody raising hundreds of millions in a token sale or people throwing money at the latest yield farming protocol. Still, he’s encouraged by the fact that it is much easier to launch a financial service than it ever has been before.
Oct 26, 2020•1 hr 16 min•Season 3Ep. 7
In this week’s podcast episode I interview Tor Bair , the founder of Secret Foundation, an organization which promotes privacy-preserving technologies, with a focus on Secret Network . Secret Network is a proof-of-stake, Cosmos-based blockchain, which has the capacity to process private transactions and, notably, private smart contracts. Tor says that for Web3 to develop into the open and permissionless system its builders want, privacy should be at the core. His biggest fear is that in a Web3 f...
Oct 19, 2020•59 min•Season 3Ep. 6
I interviewed Simon Taylor . Simon has the rare quality of being very knowledgeable about decentralized finance but also about fintech. He is the co-founder at fintech consultancy firm, 11:FS , and he previously led blockchain research at Barclays. He also leads the excellent newsletter Fintech Brain Food . Simon points to a world where fintech and defi start to converge. All the capital and users in the traditional finance will have to bridged into crypto at some point and that bridge can be fi...
Oct 12, 2020•55 min•Season 3Ep. 5
Hello Defiers! In this week’s interview, I spoke with Gavin McDermott. He's an investor at IDEO CoLab Ventures, the venture arm of design firm IDEO, and he’s one of the creators of Fair Launch Capital. While the name might suggest otherwise, Fair Launch Capital isn’t an investment firm, or at least it’s not a traditional investment firm. Instead, it gives startups no-strings-attached funding so that they can afford security audits and launch their projects in a safe way. They’re asked to conside...
Oct 03, 2020•55 min•Season 3Ep. 4
In this week’s episode, I spoke with Dan Elitzer and Clinton Bembry, who were part of the founding team of Yam. Yam Finance is an experiment in rebasing cryptocurrencies, plus token incentives, plus full on-chain governance, plus a DAO-like treasury managed by token holders. It’s also testing the power of the emoji and opened the flood gates to meme-based DeFi tokens. Dan and Clinton tell me the back story of how this crazy project was created, how the group loosely coalesced in a chat group and...
Sep 26, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Season 3Ep. 3
This week’s interview is with Jeff Zirlin, aka Jihoz, growth lead at Axie Infinity . Axie is a digital game built on Ethereum, which involves cute animals going to battle against each other and taking control of your digital assets. The big vision is that as we increasingly live our lives in the digital world, digital assets will become more and more important and applications like Axie Infinity, will become more than just games, but places where people work and socialize. The key value that blo...
Sep 19, 2020•59 min•Season 3Ep. 2
Hello Defiers! In this week’s interview, we chatted with Grammy Award-winning DJ Andre Anjos, aka RAC. Many have seen cryptocurrencies as a way to decentralize the financial system, thanks to the innovation of digital scarcity. RAC says that digital scarcity can also help disrupt the music industry. His experiments have so far showed how distributed networks can be the underlying infrastructure that helps artists can sell their creations directly to fans; how tokens on open markets can help more...
Sep 12, 2020•1 hr 11 min•Season 3Ep. 1
Stani Kulechov the founder and CEO of Aave. When we spoke Aave was the second-largest DeFi protocol, but in the days after our conversation, it rose to overtake MakerDAO and become the DeFi platform with the most assets held in its smart contracts, at over $1B in digital assets. It’s been an exponential rise for Aave, which launched just eight months ago and in that short time was able to climb the famous Defi Pulse Total Value Locked ranking to the top. It’s done so pushing DeFi forward by driv...
Aug 29, 2020•59 min•Season 2Ep. 10
Santiago Roel is partner at ParaFi Capital, one of the most active investment funds in DeFi. Before going full crypto, Santiago worked at JPMorgan’s investment banking arm, and then invested in fintech and software at a venture fund. He now uses his more traditional VC frameworks to analyze open financial protocols and finds that even by those metrics, DeFi comes out ahead. We also talked about the seemingly crazy new DeFi meme tokens and Santiago says to not underestimate their value. Maybe par...
Aug 25, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Season 2Ep. 9
In this week’s episode I speak with Alex Masmej, the first person to raise money by selling tokens not linked to any project, but linked to himself, in a sort of self-IPO. Much like shareholders taking dividends, Alex token holders can have a share of the entrepreneur’s future earnings. The money raised has helped him cover living expenses as he plans to move from Paris to San Francisco and start a tech company. He’s willing to try almost anything and see what sticks. In one of his experiments, ...
Aug 15, 2020•57 min•Season 1Ep. 8
Andre Cronje is the developer of the yearn platform and YFI token. There’s this sort of mysticism around Andre: The solo genius builder who relentlessly releases code even if it hasn’t always been properly audited or tested. The DeFi wizard capable of turning a token which he himself claimed to be valueless to be worth thousands of dollars in a few days. He talks about the actual paralyzing fear that comes with building money protocol, the huge responsibility he feels, and how finger-pointing ha...
Aug 08, 2020•1 hr 15 min•Season 2Ep. 7
In today’s episode, I speak with Polychain Capital founder Olaf Carlson-Wee. He was already telling Wired magazine about programmatic finance back in 2016, so it’s no surprise Olaf is very excited about the growth and promise of DeFi. He thinks smart contracts are enabling different ways of organizing people and capital, turning traditional corporations into internet sovereign corporations. He believes that given a compelling underlying product, liquidity mining will be an incredibly effective m...
Aug 01, 2020•53 min•Season 2Ep. 6
In this week’s epidose I speak with Bette Chen and Ruitao Su, who are building DeFi on Polkadot. While most of DeFi is being built on Etheruem, here is the team creating an entire new financial infrastructure on the decentralized network built by the Web3 Foundations and Parity Technologies —which was founded by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood. Their project called Acala, has been mostly known for its stablecoin, but they’re also building staking derivatives —a token that’s a derivative of staked...
Jul 25, 2020•1 hr•Season 2Ep. 5
In this week's episode, I speak with Lasse Clausen, founding partner of 1kx, one of the most active venture funds in DeFi. A typical VC question in the traditional tech space is it a 10x? Is it 10 times faster, better, cheaper? This concept has been dressed up very nicely as like, often with grand statements about making the world a better place, but really, Lasse says, VCs are subsidizing a market takeover. The real question they're asking is, can this become a national monopoly, where users ar...
Jul 18, 2020•52 min•Season 2Ep. 4
This week’s interview is with Vansa Chatikavanij , the CEO of OMG Network . The Bangkok-based project formerly known as OmiseGo has spearheaded research and work on a scaling technology for Ethereum called Plasma. Scaling solutions will be key for Ethereum and therefore DeFi, to continue growing. The network is already at capacity, and gas prices are getting prohibitively high, especially for complex DeFi transactions. In this interview we talk about OMG’s beginnings, the changes the project wen...
Jul 11, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Season 2Ep. 3
In this week’s interview, I spoke with Brandon Iles, the CTO of Ampleforth. Brandon is a former Google and Uber software engineer, and built his first crypto app together with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. Today, he’s trying to rebuild the way money works. For its huge ambitions, Ampleforth is a relatively little-known project. It wants to create an entirely new category of monetary assets — one that doesn’t have Bitcoin’s gold-like fixed supply, it doesn’t have Ether’s oil-like utility, it’s no...
Jun 27, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Season 2Ep. 1
This week’s interview is with Michael Anderson and Vance Spencer, co-founders of crypto venture fund Framework Ventures. Michael and Vance live and breathe crypto. The live together, work together, and spend all their time analyzing crypto startups, and actively participating in the protocols they fund. It’s how they’ve become some of the deepest thinkers in the space. They talked about how the emergence of token-based business models in the past year has been a breakthrough for crypto, legitimi...
Jun 19, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 10
This week’s interview is with Aragon co-founder Luis Cuende. Aragon is a platform for users to create their own decentralized autonomous organizations. DAOS are organizations that have as much of its operations put into code as possible, and have smart contracts execute those operations. Owners hold tokens of the DAO, much like owners of a company hold shares, and make management decisions by voting with those tokens. They’re as transparent, immutable and secure as the blockchains they run on. A...
Jun 13, 2020•54 min•Season 1Ep. 9
In this week’s interview I talk with Alexis Gauba, the cofounder of Opyn. Alexis and her team built the first decentralized options market, on Ethereum. These instruments give investors a tool to protect against market volatility and Black Swan events, like hacks, bank runs, and big price crashes. In DeFi the risk is especially high, which explains why Opyn has taken off since its February launch. Options are a key piece in traditional finance and make up the most liquid market in the world, wit...
Jun 05, 2020•54 min•Season 1Ep. 8
This week’s interview is with Sergey Nazarov, the cofounder of oracle provider Chainlink. The way blockchain applications get their data has proven to be crucial, as failures in those systems have been at the core of many of the latest attacks in decentralized finance. He says developers are currently underestimating the complexities of building data aggregators and oracle systems and says, the only reason these dangerous patterns are not as discussed is because the losses have not been Mt. Gox ...
May 30, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 7
This week's episode is an interview with Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. We talked bout everything from crypto in the pandemic, to Facebook's Libra and stablecoins, to DeFi and their ETH holdings.
May 21, 2020•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 6
This week’s interview is with Fernando Martinelli, co-founder and CEO of Balancer Labs. Balancer Labs is an AMM with a twist. Instead of liquidity providers having to deposit tokens in a pool at a pre-determined ratio together with a more liquid token (usually ETH), Balancer enables users to create token pools that have any ratio they want between their tokens. They can use any combination of tokens, and can even exclude ETH. The pools automatically rebalance when tokens’ price change, so that t...
May 15, 2020•51 min•Season 1Ep. 5
Emin Gun Sirer is a Cornell University computer science professor who has been deeply involved in the Bitcoin and Ethereum communities from the very early days. We talk about how he got started in the field, building a cryptocurrency long before Bitcoin. Gun, as friends call him, then turned his attention to Ethereum, notably catching the bug in The DAO, but failing to alert the community about it. After years scrutinizing existing blockchains, he’s back at making one himself with AVA , whose te...
May 01, 2020•1 hr 12 min•Season 1Ep. 4
Hello Defiers! This week’s interview is with MyEtherWallet founder and CEO Kosala Hemachandra. As the head of one of the most popular Ethereum interfaces, Kosala has a unique perspective on how the global pandemic has impacted activity. He also shared how coronavirus has disrupted his own life, and talks about what it’s like to run a company from his bedroom at his family’s home in Sri Lanka, on opposite timezones as the rest of his team. He also talks about how crypto was built for crises, abou...
Apr 25, 2020•42 min•Season 1Ep. 3
In this week’s episode we talk with Daniel Wang, CEO and founder of the Loopring protocol. The exchange built on the protocol launched a little over a month ago, with the goal of providing a non-custodial platform, meaning it allows users to keep control of their funds, with similar performance in throughput and cost as centralized exchanges. There’s mind boggling technology with funny names behind this protocol —zero-knowledge proofs, Snarks, Starks,— which Wang demystifies and explains. We tal...
Apr 15, 2020•48 min•Season 1Ep. 2
In this week’s episode we speak with Rune Christensen, the founder of MakerDAO, the largest lending platform by assets in decentralized finance and the issuer of the Dai stablecoin. Rune has been in crypto since 2011 and is no stranger to volatility and crazy market conditions. Still, last month was the most shocking for him yet. On March 12th, MakerDAO’s mechanism to heal loans that become under-collateralized broke down amid the market crash, allowing one trader to run off with more than $4 mi...
Apr 08, 2020•55 min•Season 1Ep. 1
