Dear Defiers, In addition to our weekly podcast series, we are happy to now bring our Weekly Recap show to all podcast platforms. Weekly Recap is a show where we discuss the hottest news of the week together with The Defiant writers and share further insights from our reports. It goes live on our YouTube channel every Friday. In this week's recap, we went through all the latest on FTX, how far the contagion spread, and discussed how DeFi benefited from the recent events. Hope you enjoy it. Also,...
Nov 19, 2022•56 min
This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak with Tyrone Lobban, the head of blockchain at JPMorgan’s Onyx, a business unit focused on digital assets. In the craziness of the past couple weeks, it’s easy to overlook or forget good news and positive developments. JP Morgan recently made history by becoming the first major bank to execute a live DeFi trade. The trade involved tokenized forex and government bonds and it all happened on the Polygon blockchain. In our conversation, we dive into the deta...
Nov 18, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Season 11Ep. 8
Dear Defiers, In addition to our weekly podcast series, we are happy to now bring our Weekly Recap show to all podcast platforms. Weekly Recap is a show where we discuss the hottest news of the week together with The Defiant writers and share further insights from our reports. It goes live on our YouTube channel every Friday. In this week's recap, we went through the latest updates from the FTX / Alameda collapse and discussed how we ended up here in the first place. Hope you enjoy it. Also, a q...
Nov 14, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 4
This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak with Hamzah Khan, Head of Defi at Polygon. Polygon is one of the biggest players in DeFi with $1.5B in TVL and in the blockchain space in general. Hamzah begins by giving us a brief overview of the Polygon ecosystem. Despite the bear market, Polygon has been forging high-profile NFT partnerships with companies like Instagram and Reddit. Its network was also used by JP Morgan’s Onyx unit to conduct the first interbank on-chain forex swap and was chosen by...
Nov 10, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Season 11Ep. 7
This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak with A.J. Warner, the Chief Strategy Officer at Offchain Labs, the builders of Arbitrum, one of the leading scaling solutions for Ethereum using Optimistic Rollups. We also welcome Tegan Kline, the co-founder of Edge Node, the initial team behind The Graph. The Defiant’s Camila Russo and Tegan are co-hosting the podcast for the first time. Going forward, they will record shows together, and Tegan will also have her own Defiant podcast episodes. Scaling i...
Nov 03, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 11Ep. 6
This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak with Gabriel Shapiro, general counsel at Delphi Labs and a member of the LeXpunK group of crypto lawyers. He’s regarded as one of the most prominent voices on regulation in the crypto space, which has lately been a major point of discussion. Recent developments include the latest draft of the DCCPA bill, Sam Bankman Fried’s industry standards proposal , the CFTC charging Ooki DAO , and the Tornado Cash sanctions . We begin our conversation with Gabriel s...
Oct 27, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Season 11Ep. 5
This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak with Ali Yahya, General Partner at a16z, also known as Andreessen Horowitz. a16z is an investment giant - they’ve raised $6.7B between their crypto funds in the last two years and are the largest crypto-dedicated fund in the world. We start by discussing how a16z got its start in crypto - their first investment, where they channelled their focus, and how they evolved to where they are today. According to Ali, we’re entering the Golden Age of blockchain a...
Oct 21, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Season 11Ep. 4
This week’s Defiant Podcast is from a conversation I had with Alex Zhang at the Unfinished Live conference. Alex is the mayor of Friend with Benefits, or FWB, a prominent DAO of creatives. Friends with Benefits started as an experiment when its founder minted and airdropped the FWB token to an early community. FWB holders gained access to private chat groups on Discord. From there, it developed into a community of thousands of members, live events and even proprietary software. Alex explains the...
Oct 13, 2022•50 min•Season 11Ep. 3
This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak with David Micley , the business development director at Wintermute, one of the largest digital asset market makers in the world. With all the macro headwinds pummeling markets, from the energy crisis in Europe, global inflation, and war in Ukraine, to the recent turmoil with Credit Suisse, we can’t help but feel a sense of deja vu about the 2008 financial crisis. David believes we’re just in the first inning of what could be a multi-year crypto winter. ...
Oct 06, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Season 11Ep. 2
This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak with Uri Kolodny and Eli Ben-Sasson, the co-founders of Starkware, one of the leading Layer 2 scaling solutions for Ethereum. Post Merge, Ethereum continues to rely on scaling solutions like Starkware and will continue to do so, according to the network’s long-term roadmap. Visa processes 1700 transactions per second, and that number is often quoted as the Holy Grail for a blockchain to become a viable settlement layer for finance. They explain how that ...
Sep 30, 2022•58 min•Season 11Ep. 1
This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak with Ben Edgington, the product owner of Teku, an Ethereum 2.0 client being developed at Consensys. It’s been a week since Ethereum switched from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and Ben has been heavily involved in the process. We start our conversation by taking a look at the aftermath of the Merge. One of the biggest criticisms of The Merge was that Ethereum under PoS would become centralized. Proof-of-stake enables individuals to delegate ...
Sep 23, 2022•59 min•Season 10Ep. 10
This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak with Robert Lauko, founder & head of research at Liquity, an overcollateralized DeFi lending protocol and issuer of the LUSD stablecoin. Following the fallout from CeFi services such as Voyager , BlockFi , and Celsius , the focus has shifted back to the core values of decentralization, which Liquity tries to apply to the fullest: LUSD is backed purely by Ether and Liquity is governance-free and has no centralized frontend. Crypto mixer Tornado Cash w...
Sep 19, 2022•1 hr 12 min•Season 10Ep. 9
This week on the Defiant Podcast we speak to Stani Kulechov , founder & CEO of Aave, one of the first lending protocols in the DeFi space. He has been around since the inception of DeFi, now Aave Labs is the leading force in this completely new side to the web3 universe; social media. Lens aims to reimagine how social networks are built; providing an open protocol for applications to flourish, and giving users the freedom to own their information and take that data with them when they from o...
Sep 08, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Season 10Ep. 8
This week on The Defiant podcast we speak to Zooko, the founder of Zcash. Privacy remains one of the hottest issues in crypto after the U.S. Treasury’s recent move to sanction Tornado Cash. Zooko believes the ability to consent to what information is made public is more about freedom than privacy and he thinks that eventually, this will be expected in the blockchain space. We explore what a private transaction using ZEC actually looks like, with shielded addresses visible only to the sender and ...
Sep 01, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Season 10Ep. 7
This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak to Jake Chervinsky, the executive vice president and head of policy at Blockchain Association , a non-profit trade association representing the crypto industry in Washington DC. Jake is one of the most qualified to discuss the US Treasury Department sanctioning Tornado Cash , a development that’s caused shockwaves through crypto. Thanking our podcast sponsors: 1inch is a DEX aggregator that finds the best rates across multiple networks. Why use a single ...
Aug 20, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Season 10Ep. 6
This week on The Defiant Podcast, we speak Will Warren, founder and CEO of 0x labs, one of the oldest and largest decentralized exchanges. 0x API is currently the 5th largest DEX by trading volume but is structurally different from other DEXs as it aggregates liquidity from multiple venues. We talk about the effect this bear market has had on the DEX ecosystem and how sliding prices have affected DEX volumes in 2022. We discuss the evolution of DEXs, having seen some massive innovations such as ...
Aug 04, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Season 10Ep. 5
This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak to Hart Lambur, co-founder of the UMA protocol. UMA is an optimistic oracle on Ethereum that aims to record any knowable truth onto a blockchain. We discuss his take on the crypto market and how the current crisis is not a DeFi crisis, but rather a failure of risk management at centralized institutions. We dive into UMA's plans for its 2.0 release, the risks posed by centralized cross-chain bridges and Outcome Finance, an upcoming brand that will encompa...
Jul 27, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Season 10Ep. 4
This week on The Defiant podcast we speak with Justin Drake . Justin is a researcher for the Ethereum foundation. He’s at the forefront of the biggest change to happen in Ethereum's history: The transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake, also known as The Merge. We go into what the next steps are before this change happens, how exactly it will be executed, and what the risks are. Last week, right after we recorded this interview, fellow researcher Tim Beiko suggested the switch would happe...
Jul 20, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Season 10Ep. 3
This week on the Defiant Podcast we speak to Arthur Breitman, the co-founder of Tezos. Created together with his wife Kathleen way back in 2014, Tezos mainnet was launched in 2018 as a proof of stake chain with smart contracts, a combo that has now become the industry standard. They were very much ahead of their time. Yet, Tezos has been slower to pick up than other Layer 1s such as Ethereum & Solana. We discuss its upcoming upgrades and roadmap, and how Arthur sees a deeper DeFi and NFT eco...
Jul 12, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Season 10Ep. 2
Joseph Delong is the former CTO of SushiSwap, one of the biggest decentralized exchanges, and the founder of Astaria, a recently created NFT lending protocol. Joseph has been heavily involved in building and managing DAOs. With the recent controversial proposals surfacing on MakerDAO and Lido, we are once again reminded of the importance of DAO governance. We begin by talking about Joseph’s analogy on what would happen if a lemonade stand was run by a DAO and reflect on some of the DAO experimen...
Jul 06, 2022•58 min•Season 10Ep. 1
This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak with Hasu , strategic advisor at Lido, strategy lead at Flashbots, MakerDAO delegate, researcher at Paradigm and host of the Uncommon Core Podcast. That’s a lot of titles and it goes to show just how deeply plugged into DeFi and crypto this anon researcher is. In this episode, we’ll focus on Lido, as it’s become a crucial piece of infrastructure for Ethereum. Thanking our podcast sponsors: dYdX has launched a Grants program with funding allocated to open...
Jun 28, 2022•47 min•Season 9Ep. 23
Gmoney is one of the most prominent NFT collectors in the space, breaking into the scene with a splash when he bought a crypto punk for 140 ETH last year. He rose t become one of the best-recognized NFT collectors and is now becoming a creator himself. Given the current market crash is hitting all areas of crypto, Gmoney dives into how it's affecting NFTs. In his previous life, GMoney was a trader in traditional finance. We talk about how he went from trading stocks to trading non-fungible token...
Jun 22, 2022•49 min•Season 9Ep. 21
This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak to Mati Greenspan. Mati is the CEO & founder of Quantum Economics, a crypto research and advisory firm. Mati believes we’ll keep seeing pain in the market, with crypto and stocks remaining highly correlated, as long as inflation persists. Only those well-funded and committed teams will make it through, and any project that survives a bear will see huge gains in the next rally. A heads up that this interview was recorded last week, right before the Ce...
Jun 15, 2022•47 min•Season 9Ep. 21
Adriana Hoppenbrouwer-Pereira is the co-founder and CMO of The Fabricant , a digital fashion house for the metaverse founded in 2018. Their belief is that fashion is identity, and digital fashion is simply an extension of the digital identity we’re building in web 3. The Fabricant is one of the most prolific digital garment creators today and we discuss how (and if) these pieces are being used and whether the market slump has affected adoption. Adriana discussed The Fabricant’s collaboration wit...
Jun 08, 2022•52 min•Season 9Ep. 20
Yoni Assia is the founder and CEO of eToro , one of the most successful crypto and stock buying apps with over 27 million users in more than 100 countries. Originally founded in 2007, it was one of the pioneering companies to incorporate crypto as early as 2013. Yoni speaks about what led to being so early and where the idea for Etoro stemmed from. He also dives into the importance of the user experience in creating a mainstream crypto trading app, and how including a social aspect to the produc...
May 24, 2022•50 min•Season 9Ep. 19
Kevin Zhou is the founder of crypto quant fund, Galois Capital and former head of trading at Kraken. Last week, Terra, one of the most prominent ecosystems in crypto, effectively disintegrated in days. Its native token Luna had over $40 B in market cap at its peak, and nearly all of it was wiped out while UST, which was supposed to be a stablecoin worth $1 crashed. It was a historical moment in crypto as never before had a project that big, crashed so hard, so quickly. Kevin was one of the few w...
May 16, 2022•58 min•Season 9Ep. 18
This week we speak to Diego Fernandez , the secretary of innovation and digital transformation for the city of Buenos Aires. Recently, news broke that Buenos Aires will be taking tax payments via crypto, an initiative that Diego helped shape. We talk about what this means for residents of the city and how it works in practice. Diego also addressed critics’ response to the measure, who questioned why Argentines would spend crypto instead of holding it as a store of value. Diego dives into the cit...
May 09, 2022•1 hr•Season 9Ep. 18
BoredElonMusk is one of the most prominent Twitter personalities in the crypto space with over 1.7M followers at the time of recording. With decades of online gaming experience, he is now taking his skills offline with his new venture, Bored Box, a curation platform for blockchain games. BoredElon grew his Twitter profile by consistently tweeting wacky but relatable inventions. We talk about how he built out his brand on Twitter, at what point he was able to leverage and monetize his audience, a...
May 03, 2022•51 min•Season 9Ep. 16
Fabian Schär is one of the most prominent academics focusing on blockchains and specifically DeFi. He has a great deal of experience speaking with regulators and studying different laws and frameworks being applied to crypto. He argues regulators should not be using old laws to regulate new tech. He also says regulation should happen at the off and on-ramp level, and at individual businesses, but not in the non-custodial world of on-chain transactions. Fabian has the somewhat controversial opini...
Apr 27, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Season 9Ep. 15
Jill Gunter is the co-founder and chief strategy officer at scaling solution Espresso Systems and a venture partner at Slow Ventures. She became interested in Bitcoin via her experience with Latin American markets — which is somewhat of a pattern in the space. She was a debt trader at Goldman Sachs, focusing on Argentina and Venezuelan bonds, and saw crypto’s potential to help those in corrupt or repressive regimes. She continued exploring how crypto can help skirt currency controls and enable m...
Apr 18, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Season 9Ep. 14
