Kyle Samani, managing partner of Multicoin Capital looks ahead to 2020 based on how the space changed from 2018 to 2019. He talks about how the space has matured and become more heterogeneous, when developers choose to build on platforms other than Ethereum and when they stick with it, and how the uncertainties about Ethereum 2.0 are affecting developers' choices. We discuss which chains he's most excited about now, why there's such a huge amount of competition in the smart contract space, and h...
Jan 03, 2020•27 min•Ep. 106
Laura recounts the tale of how she got SIM swapped, what mistakes she made, and what she did to secure her accounts and get her phone number back. She also reveals how, despite having shored up her security years before, she actually was still vulnerable. She also reveals the results of an investigation her mobile carrier did into what happened and what steps the mobile carrier is taking to deal with phone hijackings. Plus, she gives tips on how you can protect your cryptocurrency, financial acc...
Dec 27, 2019•30 min•Ep. 105
Meltem Demirors, chief strategy officer of Coinshares, talks about how the emergence of Bitcoin fits within the larger technological and financial shifts of the last decade, how crypto can integrate privacy into our digital lives and how political shifts, ideology and meme culture have helped drive adoption. We also cover her stance on shitcoin minimalism/Bitcoin maximalism, what other areas of crypto development are interesting to her, and why she thinks the development of Libra is different fr...
Dec 20, 2019•39 min•Ep. 104
Larry Cermak, director of research at The Block, looks at the macro trends in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, including what can be gleaned from derivative data, why many hedge funds are shorting Bitcoin and what has happened to trading volume since the summer. We also cover how the exchanges vary in terms of liquidity and target customer, which types of traders are active now, and which exchanges other than the Bitwise 10 also have real volume. Finally, Larry talks about what amount of real value i...
Dec 13, 2019•37 min•Ep. 103
Writer Nathaniel Rich discusses his recent long-form Vanity Fair article diving into what really happened with the Quadriga exchange debacle, what Gerald Cotten’s past really was, his relationship to his business partner Michael Patryn and who Patryn really was. He talks about their history with so-called high-yield investment programs, their falling out at Quadriga, what Cotten really did with the funds on the exchange, and the three main theories for what Cotten did, including a scam that ende...
Dec 06, 2019•45 min•Ep. 102
For Black Friday, Alex Adelman, cofounder and CEO of Lolli, talks about how, with the Lolli browser extension, shoppers can earn back, on average 7%, but as much as 45%, of their purchases in Bitcoin at over 750 merchants, including Walmart, Bloomingdales, Gap, Barnes & Noble, Postmates, Sephora, Sonos, Hotels.com and more. He talks about how about 50% of Lolli users appear to be new to Bitcoin, how 30% are women, which is likely much higher compared to other crypto companies, and how Lolli ...
Nov 29, 2019•39 min•Ep. 101
Steven Becker, president and chief operating officer of the Maker Foundation, discusses the MakerDAO system's transition to multi-collateral Dai, what benefits it gets from having multiple collateral types, why it started with Brave's BAT, and how the Dai savings rate can lower risk for users. We also talk about what incentives current users have to transition to Dai, given that the Dai savings rate is just 2% while Sai holders can enjoy interest rates over 5% in Compound and dYdX, and how the M...
Nov 22, 2019•32 min•Ep. 100
This episode features an email interview with Kuma, the pseudonymous administrator of HKmap.live , a site showing a real-time crowd-sourced map of protests in Hong Kong, which Kuma believes is the first Hong Kong protest organization to accept cryptocurrency. Although I read his answers, Kuma talks about the controversy around the rejection of the app from the Apple App Store, why HKmap.live started accepting cryptocurrencies, why they chose those particular cryptocurrencies, and what the site d...
Nov 15, 2019•32 min•Ep. 99
Wolfie Zhao, Asia editor at CoinDesk, details how Jihan Wu ousted his cofounder Micree Zhan at the Bitcoin mining giant Bitmain last week, how he justified the coup at a staff meeting the next day, and how these tensions have actually been brewing for quite a while. He also discusses how Wu was able to remove Zhan despite the fact that Zhan was a larger shareholder, whether or not the other shareholders were aware of Wu's plans, and how Zhan plans to take some unspecified legal actions next. We ...
Nov 08, 2019•34 min•Ep. 98
Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer of the Human Rights Foundation, explains why he believes China's new pro-blockchain stance could turn out to be a blunder for the country and why this could lead to a red pill/blue pill moment that gets Chinese citizens interested in Bitcoin. He also talks about how the country could use a digital yuan as financial leverage in other countries, and why he's skeptical of the Chinese government's claims that anonymous transactions will be possible in the curre...
Nov 01, 2019•34 min•Ep. 97
James Ferguson, CEO of Immutable, the creators of Gods Unchained, talks about how the video game recently doubled its number of users. In early October, after a winner of a Hearthstone tournament said, "Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our age!" in an interview, had his winnings revoked and was banned from the game for a year, Gods Unchained offered to pay the player, Blitzchung, the amount of his winnings, plus invited him to play in its first tournament next year. Ferguson describes what happ...
Oct 25, 2019•33 min•Ep. 96
Jonathan Levin, the cofounder and chief strategy officer of Chainalysis, describes how the blockchain analytics firm helped the IRS identify the administrator of the largest child porn website in the world, which ultimately led to the arrest of the administrator, Jong Woo Son, and 337 site users across 38 countries. The work also led to the rescue of 23 minors from their abusers. He describes how the site used Bitcoin, how they used Bitcoin transactions to identify the users of the site, and how...
Oct 18, 2019•31 min•Ep. 95
From DevCon 5 in Osaka, Japan, Deborah Simpier, COO and cofounder of Althea Network, describes how this decentralized internet service provider works, what problem it's trying to solve, and how it uses Ethereum. She describes how neighbors provide each other with internet access, and how they pay each other automatically on pay-as-you-go plans using a stablecoin. She also covers how she came to found Althea, what challenges she faced in explaining how it worked to her non-crypto neighbors, and A...
Oct 11, 2019•28 min•Ep. 94
Heads up, everybody! We are launching a weekly news recap, so stay tuned after the interview to find out about the top stories in crypto this week! (Links below.) Zachary Fallon, principal at Blakemore Fallon and former SEC staffer, explains why the SEC penalty against Block.One , which raised $4 billion in a yearlong ICO, got a penalty of just $24 million and didn't have to register EOS tokens as securities. He also discusses how this differs from the Kik case, what we can learn from another SE...
Oct 04, 2019•30 min•Ep. 93
Nick Tomaino, general partner of 1confirmation, discusses his firm's second fund of $45 million, announced this week, how prospective LPs have changed from 2017 to 2019, and what types of projects 1confirmation is interested in. He also reveals why he doesn't believe Libra will be meaningful in the long-term, what he thinks the top DeFi trends are, what impact Ethereum's scaling issues could have, and what other protocols the fund has invested in. Plus, he explains how the firm decides whether t...
Sep 27, 2019•26 min•Ep. 92
Jacob Franek, cofounder and COO of Coin Metrics, discusses why daily transaction fees on Ethereum have surpassed those on Bitcoin, what daily transaction fees reflect generally about a blockchain, why this change appears to be driven by demand for Tether on Ethereum, and what types of transactions people are using Tether for on Ethereum. We also cover Bitcoin vs. its forks — Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Satoshi's Vision — and whether or not the latter two are becoming medium-of-exchange coins as the...
Sep 20, 2019•28 min•Ep. 91
Nic Carter, partner at Castle Island Ventures, discusses the ways in which cryptocurrencies could weaken the state, how they're already providing an alternative to central bank currencies for people in economies undergoing hyper-inflation. He describes why Bitcoin is inherently political, which other coins he views as legitimate and whether coins should always aim to be money or other types can exist. Plus, he explains why he isn't optimistic about Libra and why Facebook should have pegged the v...
Sep 13, 2019•25 min•Ep. 90
Yan Liberman, cofounder at Delphi Digital, explains why Bitcoin dominance is back up at 70%, more than double its low at 33% at the height of the crypto bubble in early 2018, why a crypto bear market has a positive effect on Bitcoin and who is putting money into the space now. He also discusses how metrics involving Bitcoin's unspent transaction outputs, or UTXOs, affect price moves, why scaling isn't necessarily so important for bitcoin's price — but is for ether's price — and why the number of...
Sep 06, 2019•26 min•Ep. 89
Ryan Zurrer, formerly chief commercial officer and director at the Web 3 foundation and former principal and partner at Polychain Capital, discusses his recent proposal for a new DAO, reviving one of the most notorious experiments in crypto history. Zurrer explains the way it works, some of the new technologies, such as SourceCred, that he thinks could make a new DAO better than the original, what problem he wants to solve with the DAO, and how it would work. He also talks about why he believes ...
Aug 30, 2019•30 min•Ep. 88
Joerg Platzer, owner of Room77, a bar in Berlin that has accepted Bitcoin since 2011, describes how patrons who wanted to pay with Bitcoin originally had to type long Bitcoin addresses into their laptops, how people's interest in Bitcoin correlates with the markets and how the demographics of the Bitcoin users have changed over time. He discusses why the bar discourages users from sending their Bitcoins from Coinbase, Circle and BitPay, how crypto companies can surveil their companies more than ...
Aug 23, 2019•28 min•Ep. 87
Maria Shen, head of data science at Electric Capital, dives into the details of the firm's report on crypto developer activity, which analyzed 27,000 code repositories to find that a recent decrease in crypto developer activity came from a drop-off in one-time-per-month and part-time developers, while full-time developers increased 13%. She explains how this breaks out among coins, how developer activity in Bitcoin and Ethereum have consolidated, what mid-tier coins are also seeing a lot of acti...
Aug 16, 2019•26 min•Ep. 86
Rebecca Rettig, partner at FisherBroyles, talks about Kik's answer this week to the SEC's complaint, why she predicted they would make this move as opposed to filing a motion to dismiss as many had expected and what their main arguments were. We discuss the key points of their answer, such as the distinction they make between their SAFT sale to accredited investors vs. the token sale to the general public, how we could get new law applied to tokens as well as how the SEC took quotes out of conte...
Aug 09, 2019•25 min•Ep. 85
Chandan Lohda, the cofounder and CEO of CoinTracker, talks about the 10,000 letters the IRS sent to cryptocurrency holders last week, what kinds of letters were sent, what recipients should do depending on what type of letter they received and how the IRS even knew who to write to in the first place. Plus, we discuss which types of transactions are taxable events, where the tax laws still need further clarification, and which types of changes he believes should be made to tax law. Thank you to o...
Aug 02, 2019•27 min•Ep. 84
Jeremy Allaire, cofounder and CEO of Circle, explains why the company has opened a new subsidiary in Bermuda, obtained a full Digital Assets Business Act license there and how it plans to create separate offerings for the US market vs. non-US. He discusses why Circle chose Bermuda out of the many jurisdictions that have created crypto-friendly regulations, why Circle believes the SEC's April guidance on digital assets expanded the scope on which digital assets are securities and why regulators s...
Jul 26, 2019•25 min•Ep. 83
Peter Van Valkenburgh, director of research at Coin Center, explains the significance of all the governmental activity around crypto in the last week -- the President's tweets, the Treasury Secretary's and Fed Chair's remarks and of course the Congressional hearings about Libra. We discuss whether Facebook's baggage could harm regulation of the space broadly, just what Libra is and who controls it (especially compared to decentralized networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum), and how that might requi...
Jul 19, 2019•45 min•Ep. 82
Lawson Baker, head of operations and general counsel at TokenSoft (disclosure: a previous sponsor of the podcast), explains the significance of this week's SEC statement on broker-dealer custody if digital asset securities, what issues it outlines, what problems remain to be resolved, what impact it could have on the overall industry — and why this, and other regulatory guidance, could push the industry in a more cypherpunk direction. Plus, we discuss Blockstack's Reg A+ initial coin offering, w...
Jul 12, 2019•30 min•Ep. 81
Michael Casey, chairman of the advisory board at CoinDesk, CEO of Streambed Media and a former Wall Street Journal reporter who covered global financial and economic affairs, discusses the regulatory response to Libra, in particular the letter from the US. House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services to Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and the head of Calibra, David Marcus, calling on them to halt development of Libra. Casey explains why he think it would be good if the House's conce...
Jul 05, 2019•31 min•Ep. 80
Ben Mezrich, author of the Accidental Billionaires, which formed the basis of the movie The Social Network, and the author of the recently published Bitcoin Billionaires about the Winklevoss twins' rise in the cryptocurrency industry, discusses what he initially got wrong about Cameron and Tyler. He also talks about Facebook's Libra, how he thinks personal animus against the is part of Mark Zuckerberg's motivation behind this new cryptocurrency, and what Facebook and Libra would have to do to as...
Jun 28, 2019•28 min•Ep. 79
Dante Disparte, head of policy and communications for the Libra Association, describes the roles of the various entities that make up the Libra ecosystem and how he came to be in this position. He addresses the most common concern being expressed: why people should trust a financial system designed by Facebook, which has lost public trust over privacy breaches. Plus, we discuss how Facebook will handle the financial information of Calibra's users, how the Libra Association will deal with the reg...
Jun 21, 2019•32 min•Ep. 78
Dillon Chen, CEO of Edgeware, talks about how the network is distributing its tokens via a "lockdrop" in which people can lock up ether for certain time periods in order to obtain Edgeware tokens, why it chose to do so and how that could affect the distribution of the tokens. We also discuss how even people with ether frozen in the Parity multi-sig wallet can still use those funds to obtain Edgeware tokens. Plus, he describes what Edgeware tokens will be used for and how it fits in the Polkadot ...
Jun 14, 2019•25 min•Ep. 77
