Token Talks – Interviews with the Best Projects in Crypto

StarkWare is solving two of blockchain’s biggest issues. Key takeaways: StarkWare is building a full proof-stack that allows blockchains to be more scalable, secure, and private; There are many applications for this technology including allowing users to trade their digital assets on centralized exchanges from a non custodial wallet; The StarkWare team is world class, and their technology could prove to be one of the most important innovations in the blockchain space. Full show notes at http://wing.vc

What if launching an application on the blockchain was fast, simple, and user-friendly? Today, we are joined by Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol. Key takeaways: NEAR Protocol aims to be the most developer-friendly blockchain, with ambitions to be a community operated cloud platform; NEAR is using a proof of stake consensus but has a sophisticated governance model; NEAR plans to launch mainnet in summer 2019, and you can follow the team’s progress at NEARProtocol.com

What if there was a way retain total privacy with your digital transactions? Join us for a look at how Grin aims to be the first private electronic cash, how it compares to Bitcoin, and the important impact this technology could have on democracy. Key takeaways: Grin is a 3-month-old crypto asset that aims to be digital cash; Unlike Bitcoin’s fixed supply schedule, a new Grin will be created every second; Grin has seen developer-led community support, and has an early but vibrant community

UMA wants to create universal market access for financial products. Co-founder Hart Lambur joins us to discuss their newest product and future plans. Key takeaways: UMA is a decentralized financial contracts platform, built to enable Universal Market Access; Synthetic assets are incredibly important for the evolution of open finance, because they make financial markets more accessible; UMA is the infrastructure layer that will allow anyone to both create and trade synthetic assets.

Join us as we chat with Marc and Kevin from Tagomi. Key takeaways: Executing large orders of digital assets is hard and Tagomi makes it simple by automating best execution and settlement; For crypto to mature into a credible asset class, infrastructure like Tagomi is critical to making trading, settlement, and custody more professional and institutional; Tagomi has an exciting product roadmap, including adding more tokens, integrating more exchanges, and adding more financial features.

CoinList's goal is to help token issuers succeed by managing capital formation and building community. CoinList is the trusted platform for running compliant token sales; Token projects face an incredible amount of regulatory uncertainty and compliance when launching a token sale and are strongly advised to work with a platform like CoinList to launch compliantly; CoinList is successfully launching new community building projects, including the recent platform to manage developer hackathons.

How do decentralized applications get data from underlying sources and transform it in meaningful ways? Key takeaways: Getting data off blockchains today is difficult; The Graph is a decentralized platform for querying data that uses GraphQL, a query language developed in open source by Facebook; The Graph can help eliminate data silos by providing a powerful API to get exactly the data you need in a single request, seamlessly traversing and combining multiple data sources. Full show notes at http://wing.vc

Key takeaways: The size of the institutional investor base is much larger than the retail investor base, and institutional investors have yet to come into crypto; Bitwise is the first cryptocurrency fund and filed an application to launch the first Bitcoin ETF; With Bitwise, investors can rest assured their assets have proper custody, reporting, and oversight; If interested in investing with Bitwise, check out their website at www.BitWiseInvestments.com

Hear from some of the smartest investors in the space: Nic Carter and Matt Walsh of Castle Island Ventures. Key takeaways: Castle Island believes the most compelling investment opportunities in crypto are in public blockchain infrastructure and applications; Nic talks about public-private key management and potential businesses built around this industry; In addition to interest in infrastructure and application, Nick and Matt are bullish on non-sovereign, censorship-resistant store of value.

The internet has fundamentally changed our lives, but along with the benefits, what kinds of challenges has it created? Key takeaways: One of the primary concerns around today’s general purpose smart contracting platforms is the lack of privacy-preserving technologies; Oasis is a platform with improved scalability and privacy-preserving smart contracts; Privacy-preserving smart contracts have the potential to eliminate data silos by improving the coordination and access controls around data.

Felix Feng, founder of Set Protocol, talks decentralized finance and what it means to bundle your tokenized assets. Key takeaways: Felix is most interested in crypto’s potential to transform the financial services industry; Set is an important layer in the decentralized financial stack, along with other protocols like 0X, Dharma, Compound, and dYdX; Set is going after the $4 trillion currently invested in ETFs by allowing tokenized assets to be bundled in creative ways.

Tomer Afek of Spacemesh on how the Proof of Space Time consensus protocol is built on fairness and what that means in the creation of a cryptocurrency. Key takeaways: Proof of Work blockchains suffer from known scalability issues and energy waste and Proof of Stake solutions risk compromised decentralization and security; Spacemesh is creating a protocol and token for money use-cases ; Spacemesh aims to create money that is energy efficient, highly decentralized and democratic, and fair.

Figure's Mike Cagney is applying blockchain technology to traditional financial services in compelling new ways. Figure will offer faster, cheaper home equity products to consumers; Figure will abstract a way to use blockchain technology to the consumer, integrating with a new native blockchain called Provenance; Offering faster and cheaper loans is a practical use case for blockchain technology that is going after a $100 billion market; Mike is one of the smartest minds in financial services.

The CryptoKitty craze brought some attention to non-fungible tokens, but what else is possible for this type of crypto asset? Key takeaways: Scarce digital collectibles, known as non-fungible assets are one of the exciting use cases enabled by blockchains; OpenSea is the first and largest marketplace for crypto goods, like an Ebay for crypto assets; Although usability and adoption are early, there is a lot of potential for non-fungible assets to be one of the killer use cases for crypto.

Thomas France, co-founder of Ledger, explains the simple steps to using Ledger and why it’s the most popular hardware wallet. Key takeaways: It is important to understand our self-custody options when it comes to cryptocurrencies, and a hardware wallet is a popular option Ledger is a leading hardware wallet that has sold over a million wallets Ledger has recently launched new product lines including its consumer Ledger Live product and its more enterprise focused Ledger Vault product Full show notes at http://wing.vc/

Learn how dYdX makes decentralized financial derivatives and margin trading possible, and what the future may hold for the crypto counterpart of the most massive market in the world. Key takeaways: Antonio believes the most interesting area in crypto is the financial stack that is being built out dYdX has recently launched a margin trading protocol with the ability to short assets and go leverage long dYdX has plans to launch an options protocol to write, buy, or trade options on any token Full show notes at http://wing.vc/

Avichal Garg of Electric Capital on the team's crypto investment strategy and why programmable money is the foundation. Key takeaways: Electric Capital believes that the most compelling investment opportunity in crypto today is in programmable money. They define programmable money as potential monetary stores of value, private transactions, and smart contracts. Electric believes that programmable money is the most promising segment because it's useful today has a huge potential market size. Full show notes at http://wing.vc/

Zach is joined by Nader Al-Naji of Basis, to discuss scalable, stable crypto. Key takeaways: There are many benefits to cryptocurrencies, but the volatility may be a major friction to widespread adoption. Basis is a stablecoin project that uses an on-chain, algorithmic central bank to stabilize its price. The stablecoin market is becoming increasingly competitive with new projects emerging, but Basis has the most scalable model and is the most capitalized stablecoin project to date. Full show notes at http://wing.vc/

Izaak Meckler and Evan Shapiro, cofounders of Coda, join Zack to discuss accessible blockchain verification. Key takeaways: In most blockchains there is a real tradeoff between scaling and decentralization. Coda is a new cryptocurrency protocol that reduces the size of the blockchain. The Coda network uses zk-SNARKs to compress the entire blockchain into a tiny snapshot and then sends that snapshot instead. No matter how big the blockchain gets, Coda remains accessible to everyone. Full show notes at http://wing.vc/

Robert Leshner, founder of Compound, talks crypto money markets. Key takeaways: Crypto assets are awesome because they're programmable, liquid, and offer control. Every currency that exists today will eventually exist in cryptographic form. Compound is an easy to use and secure money market. Instead of requiring borrowers and suppliers to negotiate terms directly, the Compound protocol algorithmically optimizes interest rates based on supply and demand. Full show notes at http://wing.vc/

Axel Ericsson from Vest talks about staking protocols. Key takeaways: The future will be defined by staking protocols Proof-of-stake remains a challenge, but It promises a democratization of blockchain technology Full show notes at http://wing.vc/

Alan Curtis from Radar Relay talks about decentralized exchanges. Key takeaways: Decentralized exchanges are an important part of the ecosystem Unlike a centralized exchange, a decentralized exchange doesn’t know who their customers are Radar Relay is the market leader DEX in terms of volume Full show notes at http://wing.vc/

Joshua Stein from Harbor talks about tokenized securities. Key takeaways: Compliance-focused tokenized securities are the future Build decentralized platforms to capture a greater market, and Low-friction transactions are always a great sell Full show notes at http://wing.vc/

Kendrick Nguyen from Republic talks about crypto crowdfunding. Key takeaways: Republic hopes to become the Amazon of crypto fundraising Republic provides rigorous vetting of companies, and Republic wants more people to learn about cryptocurrencies Full show notes at http://wing.vc/

Nadav Hollander from Dharma chats about tokenized debt agreements. Key takeaways: Dharma aims to be like Ethereum, in a way There are a lot of amazing financial primitives being worked on, and Dharma’s focusing on the technology first, value capture second Full show notes at http://wing.vc/

Robbie Bent from Truebit talks about decentralized, scalable computation for blockchains. Key takeaways: Blockchains need to be able to meet massive computational needs Truebit brings cost-effective and secure decentralized computational power to blockchains, and New blockchain tech needs to deliver on their white papers Links: twitter.com/Truebitprotocol https://twitter.com/robbiebent1 https://github.com/TrueBitFoundation https://medium.com/truebit Full show notes at http://wing.vc/

MacLane Wilkison from NuCypher talks about infrastructure-level privacy in public blockchains. Key takeaways: Blockchains are transparent ledgers that will require data privacy tools to scale NuCypher is an infrastructure-level protocol designed to help decentralized applications manage and protect important data sets Data privacy is critical to the growth of the industry, and End-users won't see NuCypher under the hood, but seen by blockchain developers Full show notes at http://wing.vc/

Richard Ma and Don Ho from Quantstamp joined Zach DeWitt to discuss scalable smart contract security auditing. Be sure to subscribe for a new episode every two weeks. Key takeaways: Most blockchains are secure, but smart contracts are not; Ethereum and other smart contract platforms are also growing exponentially; The potential cost of smart contract failure is also growing, and Security and reliability are crucial for the crypto ecosystem to continue growing Full show notes at http://wing.vc/

Introducing Token Talks, hosted by Zach DeWitt. Join us as we highlight the best emerging projects in crypto through unbiased and exclusive interviews with blockchain technology founders. Token Talks intends to make the cryptocurrency ecosystem more accessible by connecting thought leaders and entrepreneurs with mainstream companies, consumers, and investors. This podcast is produced by Wing Venture Capital (aka “Wing”), a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm. Multiple episodes are released every month and discussions include ICOs, altcoins, decentralization, token economics and the future of digital currency in tech. Visit www.wing.vc for more details.