DeFi and staking are classified as two different animals. And yet, both facilitate a protocol-level interaction with a smart contract that pays a yield over time. For that reason, Tim Ogilvie and the team at Staked are playing in both arenas, helping customers put their idle crypto to use. Tim is the Cofounder and CEO of Staked, a crypto platform that helps institutional investors reliably and securely compound their crypto assets. On this episode of Wyre Talks, Tim joins us to share his team’s ...
Nov 13, 2019•1 hr•Ep. 55
Imagine having the capacity to build a website that only you can put up or take down. A website that doesn’t require you to answer to any government or powerful company. A truly censorship-resistant website created on a decentralized registry. Brad Kam is the Cofounder and Head of Business Development at Unstoppable Domains , a blockchain startup that makes crypto payments simple and facilitates the creation of such censorship-resistant websites. On this episode of Wyre Talks, Brad joins us to d...
Nov 05, 2019•28 min•Ep. 54
Scalability. Interoperability. Liquidity. Any number of projects in the crypto space are working to tackle these problems. But just one is solving for all three at the same time and leveraging cashflow incentives to encourage participation in the network. Varun Vruddhula is the Founder of Hashflow Network and Lawson Baker serves as an Advisor and Acting Head of Operations for the team. On this episode of Wyre Talks, Varun and Lawson join us to discuss the problems Hashflow is trying to solve in ...
Oct 30, 2019•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 53
Here at Wyre, we’re in a unique market position, serving as a bridge from the traditional payments ecosystem to the Wild West that is cryptocurrency. And we spend a lot of time on the podcast getting granular about innovative crypto projects and blockchain technology, but we have yet to focus our attention exclusively on the payments space. Until today, that is! On this episode of Wyre Talks, we’re discussing key trends in the payments industry over the last five years, digging into the rise of ...
Oct 15, 2019•57 min•Ep. 52
It’s no surprise that Joey Krug is a fan of taking calculated risks. After all, he was betting on horse races (and winning) in middle school and eventually created a mechanism for making bets on the blockchain. As an early crypto developer, Joey had the opportunity to meet a lot of promising entrepreneurs. And ultimately, he put together a syndicate to invest in the projects with the most potential. Joey is the creator of Augur , the decentralized oracle and prediction market protocol built on E...
Oct 02, 2019•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 51
GNOSIS is a pioneer in the Ethereum ecosystem, creating the first implementation of both the multisig and smart contract wallets. Their pivotal technology served as the backbone for many ICOs, and the GNOSIS team was the first to leverage the Dutch auction for trading. So, how did the team at GNOSIS become trailblazers in the crypto space? And how are they working to demonstrate the value of fully decentralized prediction markets? Stefan George is the Co-Founder and CTO of GNOSIS , a prediction ...
Sep 24, 2019•56 min•Ep. 50
If you ask Lasse Clausen, tokenized networks are better than free. And that’s why he has created a crypto investment fund around a token maximalist philosophy. A fund that capitalizes on permissionless innovation and declining trust in companies and governments. The 1kx thesis is flexible enough to adapt to the fast-moving blockchain space yet focused enough that it affords the team conviction—even when tokens are out of fashion. Lasse is a Founding Partner at 1kx Capital , a token fund designed...
Sep 11, 2019•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 49
The most powerful financial tools available live on the blockchain. The problem is, only crypto aficionados currently have access to these decentralized financial protocols like Kyber, Uniswap, Maker, and Compound. So, how can we serve the investing, trading and borrowing needs of non-crypto users, abstracting the complexities of the blockchain to bring DeFi to the world? Itamar Lesuisse and Julien Niset are the cofounders of Argent, the first smart wallet for Ethereum-based cryptocurrencies and...
Sep 04, 2019•50 min•Ep. 48
It goes without saying that DeFi is better with Bitcoin as collateral. And there is an appetite among BTC holders for ways to actively apply our money. But as of yet, there is no way to bring Bitcoin onto Ethereum that is censorship-resistant and adheres to the #1 principle of BTC: No printing money. Until now. The newly formed Cross-Chain Group is working on a project that facilitates interoperability known as tBTC Network. Matt Luongo and James Prestwich are the crypto OGs behind tBTC, a decen...
Aug 21, 2019•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 47
Crypto is a different animal. Investors who play in the blockchain space are putting their money on a science experiment rather than a company with a business plan. And the pace and complexity of the ecosystem make it impossible to have a depth of knowledge in any one area. So, the best crypto venture investors can do is secure a broad understanding of the space and adapt their beliefs to the world as it changes. Haseeb Qureshi is a former general partner at cryptocurrency hedge fund MetaStable ...
Aug 14, 2019•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 46
The creators of Perlin still hold the long-term vision of developing a revenue-generating distributed ledger system that closes the wealth gap. But until smartphones are powerful enough and broadband speeds are fast enough, the team has expanded its scope to include Wavelet, a DAG ledger that powers WebAssembly smart contracts. Kenta Iwasaki and Dorjee Sun are the cofounders of Perlin, a crypto project powering the future of trade with enterprise solutions built on top of the world’s fastest pub...
Aug 08, 2019•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 45
The ZRX token was created to facilitate governance for 0x as a public piece of infrastructure. It gave the community voting rights and was baked into the settlement layer as a way to collect fees. The idea was to get the token into the hands of the platform’s users. But soon after launch, the team realized their hypothesis was wrong, and they have spent the last 18 months developing a new token economics model that rewards liquidity providers. Will Warren and Amir Bandeali are the cofounders of ...
Jul 24, 2019•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 44
Today, we're looking back at the first six months of 2019 to review the most important developments in crypto. We start with the launch of LIBRA, discussing its ambition to own the financial infrastructure in the developing world. We introduce the evolving narrative around Bitcoin and explore what's behind BTC price action, including the trade war with China and the current monetary policy. Louis offers insight into which institutions are entering the crypto space, and Michael offers his take on...
Jul 16, 2019•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 43
How do you develop a venture fund that invests in future tech like jetpacks and exoskeletons? According to Adam Draper, you start by branding yourself as the VC interested in ‘anything that gets me closer to an Ironman suit.’ This attracts the demented builders and deal flow of wild things you need to realize your sci-fi vision of a world without borders. To date, Adam’s team has invested in more than 250 startups, 110 of which were crypto projects—including Wyre. Adam is the Cofounder and Manag...
Jul 09, 2019•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 42
Seth Rubin is the cofounder and CEO of MARKET Protocol, a framework for creating synthetic assets represented as tokens that allows users to gain exposure to a variety of assets without leaving the Ethereum network. Today, he joins us to discuss the launch of the MARKET Protocol Exchange (MPX) and minting platform, explaining the role of the MKT token in onboarding and educating new users. Seth shares the benefit to putting a cap on risk and the UX tradeoffs associated with this unique approach....
Jul 02, 2019•54 min•Ep. 41
Michael Feng was looking for a problem to solve, so he spent September of 2018 talking to everyone he could in the crypto space. The notion of liquidity kept coming up, and without knowing exactly what the solution might be, he and his team set out to answer the question: How do you create the liquidity necessary to attract traders to cryptocurrency markets? Michael weighs in on the technical and regulatory challenges associated with market making on DEXes, the centralized and decentralized exch...
Jun 25, 2019•50 min•Ep. 40
John Burnett is the Cofounder and Head of Business Development and Strategy at Omniex, an institutional operating platform for investment managers and active traders focused on crypto assets. Today, he joins us to explain how Omniex is priming the crypto market for institutional entry, describing the increasing interest in the tokenization of assets among institutional players and the impact their entry will have on the crypto ecosystem as a whole. John also discusses how Omniex differs from pla...
Jun 20, 2019•52 min•Ep. 39
Today, we’re joined by the cofounders of UMA, COO Allison Lu and CEO Hart Lambur. Allison and Hart explain how UMA facilitates bilateral derivatives by allowing the short side to be levered and collateralizing the long side at 100%, and they describe how the tokenized derivative smart contract serves as the protocol’s core technology. They go on to cover the hub-and-spoke design of the UMA market structure, the team’s decision to adhere to the ERC-20 standard, and the planned shift from a one-to...
Jun 11, 2019•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 38
Crypto wallets come in a variety of shapes and sizes. What the team stands for has an influence on who they serve, what services they offer, and how they address security. The architecture of the wallet itself is, in fact, shaped by each project’s core values. Curious how the co-founders of three very distinct wallets make decisions based on their respective mission statements? We also weigh in on security, covering the pros and cons of seed phrase recovery, the feasibility of hardware wallets a...
Jun 04, 2019•57 min•Ep. 37
Hayden Adams is the founder of Uniswap, the decentralized exchange that affords users a simple smart contract interface for trading ERC-20 tokens, a formalized model for pooling liquidity reserves, and an open-source front-end for traders and liquidity providers. Today, Hayden joins us to offer insight around the design tradeoffs he considered in building Uniswap, the pros, and cons of the constant product model, and the advantage to using ether as a single medium of exchange. Hayden also explai...
May 29, 2019•52 min•Ep. 36
Anatoly Yakovenko is the co-founder and CEO of Solana, a venture to rebuild the blockchain for scale. The Solana team is designing new architecture focused on high throughput with the goal of facilitating up to 700K transactions per second on a 1Gb network—without data partitioning. Today, Anatoly joins us to discuss how his background in distributed systems attracted him to the blockchain scalability problem and introduce his proof-of-history solution to encode the passage of time as data. Anat...
May 21, 2019•54 min•Ep. 35
Felix Feng is the CEO and Inje Yeo is the CPO of Set Protocol, the first functional asset-management protocol on the Ethereum blockchain. The team’s ultimate goal lies in bringing wealth-creation tools to a global user base. Today, Felix and Inje join us to discuss the flexibility of the Set architecture to add functionality over time and explain how the protocol allows users to source liquidity from any decentralized exchange. They also offer insight around their new product, TokenSets, sharing...
May 07, 2019•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 34
Today, we’re looking back on Q1 to explore the most important headlines in crypto. We start with a discussion of Facebook’s motivation to enter the space and how the introduction of ZuckBucks might impact the ecosystem as a whole. Michael shares his take on the Bitwise report, explaining why it doesn’t answer the right question and describing the SEC’s need to build surveillance infrastructure on the so-called Big 10 exchanges that matter. Louis covers the dominance of Binance, sharing their big...
Apr 30, 2019•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 33
By definition, margin lending is not fully collateralized. Some sort of mechanism is necessary to ensure that lenders receive their full principal, with interest, even under unforeseen circumstances. In crypto, one way to handle this is with tokens. So, what would that look like? Why are some margin lending protocols proposing a kind of ‘insurance fund’ to safeguard lender capital in the case of a black swan event? Tom and Kyle discuss how margin liquidations work on the network and how bZx ince...
Apr 23, 2019•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 32
Of the 7.5 billion people in the world, 40 million have used cryptocurrency. 2 million possess non-custodial service wallets, but only tens of thousands are engaged in using DeFi services, specifically. So, how do we get more people interested in decentralized finance? Will there be one principal entry point to the ecosystem or many? And how do we grow in a way that aligns with DeFi values and provides global accessibility? Follow Thomas (host): https://twitter.com/tomscaria Follow Brendan (Dhar...
Apr 16, 2019•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 31
Andy Bromberg is the Cofounder and President at CoinList, the trusted resource for digital asset companies to manage their token sales, airdrops and online hackathons. Andy was also a founding research scientist at the Stanford Bitcoin Group. Today, he joins us to explain how the idea for CoinList came out of a collaboration between Protocol Labs and AngelList and discuss the two key pillars of the company, fundraising and community building. Follow Thomas on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tomscar...
Apr 09, 2019•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 30
Loong Wang is the CTO of Ren, a project working to create an ecosystem for unstoppable privacy. The protocol allows users to transfer tokens in zero-knowledge, trustlessly swap between blockchains, and trade on a dark pool. Today, Loong joins us to explain how the need for a decentralized financial infrastructure inspired the launch of Ren and discuss the evolution of the project, from developing RenEx on the protocol to their current work on end-to-end privacy via RenVM. Follow Thomas on Twitte...
Apr 02, 2019•44 min•Ep. 29
Rune is the cofounder and CEO of MakerDAO, the originator of Dai, the world’s first stablecoin built on the Ethereum blockchain. Dai serves to eliminate volatility through a system of smart contracts designed to respond to market dynamics. Today, Rune joins us to discuss the imminent launch of Multi-Collateral Dai, explaining how the team overcame the challenge of formal verification and how it impacts product quality. He shares the impetus for the recent Dai stability fee increase and offers in...
Mar 26, 2019•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 28
Nadav is the Founder and Project Lead at Dharma, a decentralized protocol for globally accessible lending products built on Ethereum. Today, he joins us to discuss the current audience for the Dharma Lever product and share his long-term ambitions for the platform. Nadav explains how he thinks about the problem of unsecured lending on the blockchain, from creating a reliable reputation system to making crypto usable among the general population. Follow Nadav on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Nadav...
Mar 20, 2019•1 hr•Ep. 27
James Prestwich and Matthew Hammond are two of the three cofounders of Summa, a startup working to provide high-impact financial tools for the new economy. At present, the team is leveraging their expertise in blockchain architecture to create contracts that link assets across chains. Today, James and Matthew join us to share Summa’s mission to employ cross-chain communication to unify a fragmented ecosystem. Follow James on Twitter: https://twitter.com/_prestwich Follow Matthew on Twitter: http...
Mar 13, 2019•1 hr•Ep. 26
