Podcasts about defi summer

Dans cet épisode du podcast Cryptoast, on reçoit à nouveau Romain, fondateur de l'ex-projet Paladin devenu Trevee. Quatre ans après le DeFi Summer, il revient sur son parcours, les hauts, les bas, et la manière dont lui et son équipe ont transformé un écosystème crypto chaotique en une plateforme pérenne. On parle DAO, stablecoins, tokenomics, Memecoins et de l'évolution du marché crypto en 2025.X de Romain ► https://x.com/Figue_meRings ► https://rings.money/ Paladin ► https://quest.paladin.vote/ Qu'est ce qu'une DAO ? ► https://cryptoast.fr/dao-organisation-decentralisee/ Nos podcasts sont aussi sur :

In this episode, Sid Powell joins us to break down why institutional capital is flooding into DeFi. While retail still chases the casino, the smart money is after real yield, onchain credit, and tokenized assets with actual revenue. Is this the start of DeFi Summer 2.0? ~~~~~

How do we rebuild trust in a decentralized financial system that's been rocked by collapses and scandals?This week on The Index, host Alex Kehaya sits down with Alexandre Elkrief, Co-founder and CEO of August, to discuss the future of crypto, stablecoins, and DeFi—and how his team is rebuilding trust in the ecosystem with Upshift. Designed to replace blind trust with verifiable transparency, Upshift is a breakthrough protocol that's redefining the infrastructure of decentralized finance.After managing institutional DeFi positions during the chaotic “DeFi Summer,” Elkrief witnessed the system's flaws up close. Most strategies were built on spreadsheets and assumptions, lacking the tools to manage risk or offer real transparency. Upshift solves this with a revolutionary tri-party account model that puts users back in control—no more operating in the dark.With over $300 million already managed in smart contract vaults, Upshift gives users, asset issuers, and strategists clear, auditable access to capital and strategy. As DeFi matures beyond hype and into serious financial engineering, Elkrief envisions Upshift as the “BlackRock of DeFi”—a platform where trust is earned through code, not promises.Don't miss this powerful conversation on the future of crypto, stablecoins, and decentralized finance—and how Upshift is setting a new standard for transparency, trust, and scale.Website: https://www.augustdigital.io/Follow on X: https://x.com/upshift_fiShow LinksThe Index X ChannelYouTube

What if DeFi value flowed back to its users?In today's episode, we're exploring the Berachain ecosystem with its founder, Smokey The Bera, to dive into this idea and talk about the chain's rapid growth.Berachain is different. It's built on a unique symbiotic relationship between the chain, validators, and apps. By using game theory, it lets users create strategies based on the tokens they want to optimize and their risk preferences.We also dig into how Berachain's flow mechanism works, where apps revenue flows straight back to BGT holders, and touch on things like pre-deposit vaults, the formation of ecosystem alliances, unexpected institutional interest, and how PayPal USD is finding a new home on Berachain.Let's dive in.Join The Rollup Edge: https://members.therollup.coWebsite: https://therollup.co/Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1P6ZeYd..Podcast: https://therollup.co/category/podcastFollow us on X: https://www.x.com/therollupcoFollow Rob on X: https://www.x.com/robbie_rollupFollow Andy on X: https://www.x.com/ayyyeandyJoin our TG group: https://t.me/+8ARkR_YZixE5YjBhThe Rollup Disclosures: https://therollup.co/the-rollup-discl

Josie Leung is COO and Co-Founder of MilkyWay, the first and largest liquid staking and restaking protocol for the modular ecosystem. Previously in her career, Josie led product efforts at Crypto.com during DeFi Summer, supported ecosystem growth at Tendermint, and held roles at Composable Finance and LinkedIn. Her experience spans product development, business development, and community engagement, ensuring MilkyWay's operations and market presence align with its goals. Outside of work, Josie is a certified scuba dive master and yoga instructor.

Josie Leung is COO and Co-Founder of MilkyWay, the first and largest liquid staking and restaking protocol for the modular ecosystem. Previously in her career, Josie led product efforts at Crypto.com during DeFi Summer, supported ecosystem growth at Tendermint, and held roles at Composable Finance and LinkedIn. Her experience spans product development, business development, and community engagement, ensuring MilkyWay's operations and market presence align with its goals. Outside of work, Josie is a certified scuba dive master and yoga instructor.

In this special episode of Beyond the Code, Yitzy Hammer welcomes back Jonathan Caras for a lively discussion on the rise of meme coins and their impact on the crypto landscape. From the evolution of token issuance—Bitcoin, ICOs, DeFi Summer—to the chaotic yet fascinating world of meme tokens like $TRUMP Coin and $MELANIA Token, Jonathan unpacks how these tokens sidestep traditional expectations and regulatory hurdles. Together, they explore the cultural and community-driven value of memes, the role of innovation versus speculation, and what this new era of crypto might mean for the industry's future. Tune in for sharp insights and a touch of humor on one of the most unexpected trends in Web3!

Kkrusher (Kevin Rusher) has been deeply involved in the cryptocurrency industry since 2017, transitioning to a full-time focus in 2020. With a background in accounting and finance, he explored Bitcoin academically during his third year of university, when writing a paper on Financial Technologies. Initially aspiring to become a crypto accountant, Kkrusher embarked on a diverse journey, which included creating an off-the-record index fund for family and friends, deploying capital to DeFi, building and managing a medium-scale GPU mining facility (formerly the largest Raven Coin miner), and working at a crypto exchange conducting KYC/AML checks for individuals and businesses. Inspired by the potential of DeFi after the 2020 DeFi Summer, Kkrusher shifted his focus to bridging traditional finance with decentralized systems. Today, he leads RAAC with a mission to make traditional assets accessible through innovative, blockchain-driven solutions.

Have you wondered why you're not getting the six figure airdrops like you did from back in DeFi Summer of 2020? Jake Kim of Mitosis—and former Luna Anchor dev—spills the tea.#blockchaintech #technews #web3news #interchainfm #cryptocurrency #cryptopodcasts #mitosis

Imran and Qiao are back to discuss the state of the crypto market this Q1.No BS crypto insights for founders.Timestamps(00:00:00) Intro(00:00:54) Imran's New Look(00:02:24) Winter Break Activities(00:03:26) Reflections on the New Era of Crypto(00:04:24) DeepSeek(00:09:30) The AI Agent Craze(00:10:59) "Are we near the end of the AI meta?"(00:16:50) AI Impact and Adoption(00:19:23) AI in Daily Life(00:23:52) 1999 Style Bubble in AI Stocks(00:25:15) Where Are We in this Cycle?(00:26:29) Key Risk Factors(00:32:02) "I find this AI meta uninspiring"(00:34:34) "Pump.fun is now a startup launchpad"(00:35:46) AI Meta Compared to DeFi Summer(00:39:48) Decentralized Compute(00:41:52) What is Glow?(00:42:32) Energy DePIN(00:44:29) Predictions for the Year(00:44:41) "Trends actually matter now"(00:45:26) Trends We're Seeing Right Now(00:46:13) What's Next(00:47:56) Crowdfunding and Coordination in Crypto(00:48:52) Stablecoins and Neobanks(00:53:41) Influence of AI Agents(00:57:49) AI Agent Meta and Social Tokens(01:00:16) Market Predictions(01:00:43) "AI agent meta killed the meme token meta"(01:02:58) "How would you construct your portfolio?"Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3N675w3Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/3snLsxUWebsite: https://goodgamepod.xyzTwitter: https://twitter.com/goodgamepodxyzWeb3 Founders:Apply to Alliance: https://alliance.xyzAlliance Twitter: https://twitter.com/alliancedaoDISCLAIMER: The views expressed herein are personal to the speaker(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other person or entity. Discussions and answers to questions are intended as generalized, non-personalized information. Nothing herein should be construed or relied upon as investment, legal, tax, or other advice.

Ever wonder who's on the frontlines bringing you all the news and updates from the world of crypto and Web3? Join members of the Cointelegraph editorial team in the first-ever roundtable episode to go behind the scenes in the newsroom with the ones telling the stories. The team reflects on the key moments, trends and surprises in the crypto and blockchain space during 2024, while also setting the stage for what's ahead in 2025.This episode was hosted and produced by Savannah Fortis @savannah_fortis. Follow our team on X: Gareth Jenkinson - Managing editor & head of multimedia @gazza_jenks, Zoltan Vardai - Breaking news reporter EU team @ZVardai, Turner Wright - Senior policy reporter US team. Follow Cointelegraph on X @Cointelegraph.Check out Cointelegraph at cointelegraph.com[02:13] Bitcoin ETF approval kicks off 2024[06:51] Macro perspective of TradFi[08:29] Trump's presidential victory sets the stage[13:04] Ripple/XRP's lawsuit came a head[17:16] The crypto dichotomy of mass adoption[25:46] Compliance and regulatory impacting decentralization[28:40] Retrospect on crypto 2024 conferences [35:30] Shifting sentiment toward Bitcoin[41:00] Note on Telegram mini apps[41:57] 2025 year in crypto team predictions If you like what you heard, rate us and leave a review!The views, thoughts and opinions expressed in this podcast are its participants' alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph. This podcast (and any related content) is for entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial advice, nor should it be taken as such. Everyone must do their own research and make their own decisions. The podcast's participants may or may not own any of the assets mentioned.

SummaryPiers and Martin dive into the world of Maple Finance and Syrup Finance, tracing their journey from the wild days of DeFi Summer to their current status in the crypto space. They talk about the benefits to using Maple's platform, particularly for borrowers leveraging ETH and BTC as collateral. Maple and Syrup are shaking up DeFi by making loans and investment opportunities super accessible, focusing on tokenization, which turns assets into tradable digital tokens. Tokenization is revolutionizing the borrowing and investing game, unlocking fresh liquidity through Maple's over-collateralized loans and boosting yield optimization with Syrup's accessible lending pools.As the conversation unfolds, Piers and Martin uncover the hurdles in attracting institutional users and stablecoin lenders, highlighting how Maple and Syrup keep a cohesive strategy despite running separately. They delve into the reasons behind Syrup's launch, distinguishing its unique perks compared to big names like Aave and Compound. Piers and Martin stress the need for innovative solutions that cater to the evolving needs of DeFi users and explore how these platforms are designed to support a diverse range of users.Looking ahead, they speculate on the potential impact of AI agents on the future of Maple and Syrup, while tackling critical issues like collateral illiquidity. Their insights touch on the historical challenges of real estate tokenization and potential pathways for improvement. Ultimately, they emphasize the transformative power of combining tokenization with borrowing, positioning it as a significant unlock for the DeFi ecosystem.Tune in for an engaging discussion packed with valuable insights, challenges, and future possibilities in the rapidly evolving world of DeFi!Key takeawaysMaple Makes Borrowing Sweet and Simple: With tokenized assets, Maple is putting the power to borrow and lend right in users' hands, making capital accessible without needing a million-dollar portfolio.Syrup Pools for the People: Syrup Finance focuses on building accessible investment pools, so users can start investing and lending alongside DeFi's best—without needing to dive into complex financials.Tokenization: By tokenizing real-world assets, Maple lets users do more than just hold investments—they can leverage, borrow, and grow their portfolio faster than ever before.Tokenizing Real Estate: Real estate may be a tough nut to crack, but Maple's approach is helping users start exploring the potential of tokenizing properties, making real estate closer to DeFi than ever.AI-Driven, User-Accessible Markets: With AI on the rise, Maple and Syrup are ready to make market knowledge accessible, letting users manage, trade, and invest as confidently as the big players.Chapters00:00 — Introduction to Maple & Syrup01:26 — From DeFi Summer to Building Syrup06:25 — Why Use Maple? Who's Borrowing & Why it Matters10:09 — Who's Borrowing Using ETH & BTC Collateral11:52 — Challenges in Attracting Institutional Users14:37 — Attracting Stablecoin Lenders18:13 — Maple & Syrup: Separate Platforms, Same Strategy19:09 — Why Syrup? The Story Behind Its Launch22:51 — Syrup vs. Aave & Compound: What Sets It Apart?25:53 — The Future of Maple, Syrup, and DeFi: AI Agents30:03 — Solving Collateral Illiquidity: Insights & Risks32:46 — Why Real Estate Tokenization Fails & What's Next38:17 — Tokenization & Borrowing: DeFi's Big Unlock41:21 — Where to Learn More About Maple & SyrupFurther resourcesMaple FinanceSyrup @maplefinance

Listen/Subscribe on:* Apple Podcasts* SpotifyHint Health co-founder and CEO Zak Holdsworth retains a strong Kiwi accent - after all, he grew up on a farm near Gisborne. It was no ordinary farm, however, as Zak tells us.Considering his mother was a diplomat and his father an inventor and pioneer of pultrusion, Zak developed a taste for innovation in the wider world, and eventually headed off to Stanford Graduate School of Business to achieve his MBA. Zak worked briefly as a VC prior to joining the founding team ofWellnessFX in 2011, a California company which diagnosed health conditions through blood analysis.He then went on to co-found Hint Health in 2014 – a platform which has raised $64 in investment and today handles over a billion dollars worth of payments per year.Based in San Francisco, Hint is a vertical SaaS platform powering Direct Primary Care practitioners allowing them to to focus on patients in an industry which has until recently been far too dependent on the insurance system to cover patient costs and which - as Zak tells us - wastes more money annually than NASA's 60-year budget. Disrupting the $4 trillion US healthcare industry is a topic also shared by our previous guest Dr Zachary Tan.Zak joins us to share his ideas about finding and investing in disruptive startups, the future of cryptocurrency, and how New Zealand might be a great place to run the next Xero from.In today's episode, we discuss:* Hint Health's mission to step away from insurance, give everyone a transparent rate of costs and connect patients with unlimited access to primary care, telemedicine, urgent care and other services - the way Zak remembers it when he was a child in NZ* Getting into Stanford business school, realising which paths weren't ideal, before taking on US healthtech with Hint Health* How Zak's passion for startups included forays into venture capitalism as well as patenting a phone charger* The staggering percentage of each dollar Zak feels is wasted when handled through health insurance.* Reasons for lack of change in US healthcare* Becoming respected in the healthtech community with the Hint Summit annual conference* Whether the startup community's expectations of how quickly a startup should triple or 100x its revenue are fair expectations or not.* DeFi Summer, and lessons learned while investing in crypto currency* Faith in Bitcoin* Zak's balance between being plugged into Silicon Valley but having peace and tranquility to focus on his family.* …and whether New Zealand's tech startup ecosystem is ready to host another Xero.Referenced:* Hint Healthhttps://www.hint.com/* Stanford Graduate School of Businesshttps://www.gsb.stanford.edu/* The Hint Summithttps://summit.hint.com/Where to find Zak Holdsworth:* LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/zakholdsworth/X/Twitter https://x.com/zakholdsworth?lang=en This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.diaspora.nz

Today, we're unraveling the concept of "based rollups" with The Based Stack from Spire Labs. Spire's framework for building "based appchains" is designed to utilize Ethereum's base layer while offering a whole new level of flexibility and control. At the heart of Spire's offering is the idea of customizable composability. They've developed a way for app developers to decide exactly how their chains interact with Ethereum's state, which could be a gamechanger for optimizing onchain applications. Spire has developed a modular framework to customize sequencing, deeply optimizing the appchain sequencer. We'll break down Spire's approach to Ethereum alignment but also how based rollups open up new possibilities for cutting costs and improving user experience. Plus, Spire's focus on real-time state access brings back smooth, interconnected feel of the DeFi Summer era on Ethereum. We cover everything from the nuances of Ethereum's sequencer election mechanism to the role of pre-confirmations in shaping user interactions. Let's explore what makes Spire stand out in the current rollup landscape and why it might just be the approach developers have been waiting for. Website: https://therollup.co/ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1P6ZeYd.. Podcast: https://therollup.co/category/podcast Follow us on X: https://www.x.com/therollupco Follow Rob on X: https://www.x.com/robbie_rollup Follow Andy on X: https://www.x.com/ayyyeandy Join our TG group: https://t.me/+8ARkR_YZixE5YjBh The Rollup Disclosures: https://therollup.co/the-rollup-discl

One of the core ideas that we shared in this podcast and throughout the NYC sessions was creating more optimizations for Ethereum L2s which currently don't exist today. It feels like we've settled in to the current standards of 2 second block times and a standard of TPS which has been normal. MegaETH is trying to flip this model on its head. Centralized block production via a beefy sequencer, and decentralized block validation via inheriting Ethereum's security. For those who've been in the DeFi for a while, it's clear that performance and scalability have always been key challenges (remember DeFi Summer?). MegaETH steps into this conversation with a fresh perspective, focusing on maximizing Ethereum's potential rather than breaking away into becoming an L1. "Make Ethereum Great Again" = MEGA. We sat down with Namik, one of MegaETH's co-founders, to get a better understanding of their architecture and strategy. From leveraging Ethereum's security to scaling performance with 100,000 TPS and 1ms block times, they're pushing boundaries without sacrificing decentralization...or are they? What are the key tradeoffs with their design? Is MegaETH thinking about becoming an L1? Why has their barbell brand strategy been so successful thus far? Testnet is coming very soon, and Namik was kind enough to share some alpha with us in this stream. MegaETH has stayed true to the ethos of building with Ethereum while aiming to bring in new users and use cases. Hope you enjoy this fast paced conversation live from the heart of NYC. Website: https://therollup.co/ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1P6ZeYd.. Podcast: https://therollup.co/category/podcast Follow us on X: https://www.x.com/therollupco Follow Rob on X: https://www.x.com/robbie_rollup Follow Andy on X: https://www.x.com/ayyyeandy Join our TG group: https://t.me/+8ARkR_YZixE5YjBh The Rollup Disclosures: https://therollup.co/the-rollup-discl

The latest price moves and insights with Jennifer Sanasie.To get the show every day, follow the podcast here.CoinDesk's Jennifer Sanasie discusses the comeback of DeFi summer as Steno Research's new report points to a potential resurgence of decentralized finance.-This content should not be construed or relied upon as investment advice. It is for entertainment and general information purposes.-This episode was hosted by Jennifer Sanasie. “Markets Daily” is produced by Jennifer Sanasie and Melissa Montañez, and edited by Victor Chen. All original music by Doc Blust and Colin Mealey.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The latest price moves and insights with Jennifer Sanasie.To get the show every day, follow the podcast here.CoinDesk's Jennifer Sanasie discusses the comeback of DeFi summer as Steno Research's new report points to a potential resurgence of decentralized finance.-This content should not be construed or relied upon as investment advice. It is for entertainment and general information purposes.-This episode was hosted by Jennifer Sanasie. “Markets Daily” is produced by Jennifer Sanasie and Melissa Montañez, and edited by Victor Chen. All original music by Doc Blust and Colin Mealey.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ethereum's early marketing was focused on building an infinite garden. An open space, for experimentation and innovation of any kind. No walled gardens. No closed systems. No incentive misalignment. That has changed, and its time to talk about how we can adjust our course as a community. Ethereum's shift towards a rollup-centric roadmap has been imperative for scaling. It's led to the emergence of rollup clusters like Optimism's Superchain and Arbitrum Orbit, each creating their own ecosystems within the larger Ethereum network. While this has been a necessary step for handling more transactions and reducing costs, it's also introduced a new layer of complexity—fragmentation. In the early days of Ethereum, composability—the ability for different DeFi applications to seamlessly interact with each other on L1 during DeFi Summer—was one of the platform's strongest features (and still is, on the baselayer). The concept of “money legos” allowed developers and users to stack and integrate various protocols effortlessly. However, with the rise of rollup clusters and L2s in general, this once smooth experience has become more difficult to navigate for users. This fragmentation poses a significant challenge to the Ethereum community, especially as other blockchains like Solana offer more unified environments. Solana's approach, which prioritizes a single, contiguous ecosystem, has put pressure on Ethereum to address these composability issues. The competition is heating up, and it's clear that for Ethereum to remain at the forefront, it needs to regain that seamless user experience. So, we invited Jill Gunter from Espresso Systems on the pod after seeing a ton of her written content around making Ethereum composable again. We discussed the why behind Ethereum scaling, more than the how, which was a refreshing feel out of the weeds. Towards the end, we did get into the tech of Espresso, which is building coordination system for block building via a marketplace approach. This allows different rollups to opt in and out as needed, offering flexibility while maintaining the benefits of coordinated block building. We also asked Jill if Espresso is a shared sequencer...and the answer was pretty funny. We also asked what the next big hurdle is going to be once the Ethereum L2 landscape is re-bundled back together. Hope you enjoy. Website: https://therollup.co/ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1P6ZeYd.. Podcast: https://therollup.co/category/podcast Follow us on X: https://www.x.com/therollupco Follow Rob on X: https://www.x.com/robbie_rollup Follow Andy on X: https://www.x.com/ayyyeandy Join our TG group: https://t.me/+8ARkR_YZixE5YjBh The Rollup Disclosures: https://therollup.co/the-rollup-discl

In this episode of the DeFi Download, Piers Ridyard talks with Nikita Ovchinnik, Co-Founder of Barter, a smart router for DeFi swap routes. They delve into Nikita's foray into crypto, the inner workings of Barter, the MEV problem and its possible solutions, and the importance of market makers.  Summary Nikita describes his journey into crypto, which began in 2017 after initial scepticism. He eventually joined 1inch as their first outsider employee. Nikita describes 1inch's explosive growth during the DeFi Summer, as well as its focus on integrating with wallets and navigating the fundraising landscape until eventually securing investment from FTX. The conversation between Nikita and Piers dives next into Barter, exploring its role as a smart router program in the DeFi ecosystem. Barter is a decentralized protocol that provides transparent trade routes across liquidity providers like CoW Swap and UniswapX, minimizing costs and maximizing efficiency. Barter has over $4 billion processed on Ethereum. Key takeaways Understanding MEV: MEV stands for "Miner Extractable Value" and refers to the profit that miners can extract from the reordering of transactions and other manipulations in DeFi protocols. It occurs due to the way transactions are processed and confirmed, which can lead to arbitrage opportunities that benefit miners at the expense of regular users and liquidity providers. MEV has become a significant concern in Ethereum and other blockchain networks where DeFi activities are prevalent. Efforts to Mitigate MEV: Platforms like CoW Swap and UniswapX aim to reduce MEV by implementing strategies such as MEV blockers. These blockers prevent transaction details from being visible in public mempools, thereby limiting the ability of miners to front-run transactions or exploit price discrepancies for profit. By managing how transaction orders are processed and confirmed, these platforms attempt to minimize the negative impact of MEV on users and liquidity providers.  Challenges and Future Directions: While MEV blockers represent a step towards mitigating MEV, the challenge remains complex and ongoing. Solutions such as batching and matching user orders across different DEX platforms without tapping directly into AMM liquidity provide users with better rates and lower gas costs, thereby making DeFi more efficient and less susceptible to MEV exploits. However, achieving these goals in a decentralized and efficient manner without reliance on centralized systems remains a significant hurdle. The Critical Role of Market Makers: While the transparency and fairness of traditional market makers on centralized exchanges is under question, advancements in DeFi and AMMs like those on Uniswap are improving liquidity provision to cryptocurrency markets. Despite the fact that market makers are necessary for efficient trading, newer DeFi protocols are offering competitive liquidity solutions, potentially reducing reliance on traditional market makers. Chapters 00:00 — Introduction 01:33 — Nikita's background and journey into crypto 04:40 — Nikita's role and experiences at 1inch 09:22 — FTX's investment in 1inch 11:49 — What is a Smart Router program 13:47 — Barter swaps: Who submits the transaction? 17:02 — The journey from 1inch to Barter 21:57 — MEV: How CoW Swap and UniswapX reduce it 34:22 — Are Market Makers essential? 41:07 — Where to find out more about Barter Further resources Website: barterswap.xyz   Twitter: @BarterDeFi 

Luke Youngblood is a former Coinbase employee and one of the founding contributors to the onchain finance protocol Moonwell. Recently, Moonwell became one of the first apps to integrate Coinbase's new smart wallet. In this episode, Youngblood explains how smart wallets solve major crypto onboarding pain points — and could be the key to bringing over a billion people onchain. OUTLINE 00:59 Moonwell Overview 02:21 Youngblood's Background 04:56 DeFi Summer 07:42 Smart Wallets 09:54 Smart Wallet Security 13:58 Onchain Economy 17:12 Crypto App Developers 24:40 Moonwell's Mission 32:36 Closing Thoughts This episode is brought to you by our sponsor Polkadot Polkadot is the blockspace ecosystem for boundless innovation. To discover more head to polkadot.network The Block Community The Block is launching a new community experience for fans of The Scoop! Follow us on Lens to stay in the loop: hey.xyz/u/theblockcommunity The Block Newsletters The Block's newsletters bring you the latest news and analysis of the fast-moving crypto and DeFi markets. To subscribe, visit theblock.co/newsletters

Tristan Frizza is the Founder of Zeta Markets. Tristan's curiosity for crypto was ignited in 2017 when he traded his first cryptocurrency, spurring him to finish his Computer Science degree with an emphasis on distributed systems and PoW blockchain technology. He then worked in AI research and as a data scientist in Silicon Valley, eventually writing his thesis on Generative Adversarial Network for Image Super-Resolution for which he received First Class Honours.Motivated by a passion for open-source software and the potential to democratize finance, Tristan co-founded Zeta. His venture aimed to introduce transparency and accessibility to the financial sector, drawing on his deep technological expertise and vision for the future of global markets. The turning point came in 2021 when Tristan and his team triumphed in a Solana hackathon, outshining over 13,000 participants, which catalyzed the transformation of their proof of concept into a prominent decentralized exchange.Today, Zeta is a testament to Tristan's ambition and innovation, having processed over $5 billion in trading volume. His journey from a crypto enthusiast to a trailblazer in decentralized finance illustrates the impact of perseverance, hard work, and conviction in blockchain technology in reshaping the financial landscape.In this conversation, we discuss:- Perpetual trading- Solana's DeFi Layer 2 plans & Ecosystem- 2024 DeFi summer- $Z token-New $5M Strategic Round led by @ElectricCapital- The future trajectory of DeFi- The role of enhanced staking mechanisms- Fostering a robust and secure trading environment- Innovative tokenomics- Solana congestion issues- Ethereum vs. SolanaZeta MarketsWebsite: www.zeta.marketsX: @ZetaMarketsDiscord: discord.gg/Xn9HCJaDZdTristan FrizzaX: @Tristan0xLinkedIn: Tristan Frizza  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------  This episode is brought to you by PrimeXBT.  PrimeXBT offers a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders that demand highly reliable market data and performance. Traders of all experience levels can easily design and customize layouts and widgets to best fit their trading style. PrimeXBT is always offering innovative products and professional trading conditions to all customers.   PrimeXBT is running an exclusive promotion for listeners of the podcast. After making your first deposit, 50% of that first deposit will be credited to your account as a bonus that can be used as additional collateral to open positions.  Code: CRYPTONEWS50  This promotion is available for a month after activation. Click the link below:  PrimeXBT x CRYPTONEWS50

A reading and discussion inspired by https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2024/04/19/bitcoin-will-power-the-next-defi-summer/ Today's Show Brought To You By Ledger - 5% to Bitcoin Developers When You Buy https://shop.ledger.com/pages/bitcoin-hardware-wallet Consensus 2024 is happening May 29-31 in Austin, Texas. This year marks the tenth annual Consensus, making it the largest and longest-running event dedicated to all sides of crypto, blockchain and Web3. Use code BREAKDOWN to get 15% off your pass at https://go.coindesk.com/3PWW96A. Superintelligent - Learn AI fast. Get 50% off your first month with code "breakdown" https://besuper.ai/ Enjoying this content? SUBSCRIBE to the Podcast: https://pod.link/1438693620 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/nathanielwhittemorecrypto Subscribe to the newsletter: https://breakdown.beehiiv.com/ Join the discussion: https://discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8 Follow on Twitter: NLW: https://twitter.com/nlw Breakdown: https://twitter.com/BreakdownNLW

Chris Bradbury, chief executive officer of DeFi capital management protocol Summer.fi (ex Oasis.app). Chris is an experienced product lead, who is passionate about helping teams create products that users love and use everyday.   After graduating in Engineering, Chris started his career by working in various fintech companies and startups initially as a software developer and then product manager. He joined the Blockchain and DeFi space in 2018, when he took the role of  product manager for Maker Foundation (MakerDAO), eventually becoming product lead for Oasis.app to create real usage for Dai and Maker Vaults. From June 2021, Chris became the CEO of Oazo Apps, the team behind Oasis.app, which is now a stand alone company aiming to become the most trusted place in DeFi to deploy and manage your capital.   Social media pages: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-bradbury-b7354246/?originalSubdomain=uk https://twitter.com/chrisbducky --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/crypto-hipster-podcast/support

Guest post by Jamie Elkaleh is an experienced public speaker, dedicated crypto enthusiast and educator, and Bitget's Country Manager. Bitget Empowers Blockchain Dialogue at the Heart of Dubai with Sponsorship of Blockchain Ireland Meetup Bitget, a leading platform in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space, proudly sponsored the latest Blockchain Ireland meetup event in Dubai, held at McCafferty's in JVC. The event, which took place on February 23, 2024, attracted over 30 professionals from diverse companies and backgrounds, fostering a rich environment for networking and knowledge exchange. Blockchain Ireland Meet Up in Dubai Lory Kehoe, the esteemed founder and Chair of Blockchain Ireland and MSX Head of Stablecoin, was in attendance, adding significant value to the discussions. "Blockchain Ireland was delighted to host our first (but not last) UAE meet-up with Bitget. 50 people from around the world (not just Ireland) came together to discuss the latest developments with L2s, the future of NFTs and tokenization. Looking forward to the next one",- said Lory. The event marked a pivotal moment for the blockchain community in Dubai, creating a platform for collaborative conversations and partnerships. Bitget Country Manager, Jamie Elkaleh commented, "Sponsorship of this event highlights our commitment to providing networking and educational opportunities to the Irish Crypto community." Elkaleh's statement reflects Bitget's dedication to supporting and nurturing the growth of the blockchain community, not only in Dubai but globally. Opportunities arising from the event were plentiful, with participants delving into discussions about recruiting talents, hosting more web3 focused events, expanding networking circles, and connecting with venture capitalists and other investors in the blockchain space. Key topics of conversation ignited passionate discussions, covering the latest trends and developments in the industry. Conversations ranged from the prospects of a Bitcoin ETF, the burgeoning Defi Summer, the impact of Layer 2 solutions, the diverse world of Altcoins, to the stability of Stablecoins. Industry challenges were not overlooked, as participants delved into barriers to entry and contemplated the implications of the Bitcoin halving and ETF on the broader market. Bitget's sponsorship of the Blockchain Ireland meetup underscores its commitment to fostering an inclusive and collaborative blockchain ecosystem in Dubai. The company believes in the power of such events to drive innovation, collaboration, and growth within the industry. As the blockchain community eagerly anticipates the next gathering in conjunction with Blockchain Ireland, Bitget remains dedicated to supporting initiatives that propel the industry forward, fostering a dynamic and thriving blockchain landscape. Written by Jamie Elkaleh is an experienced public speaker, dedicated crypto enthusiast and educator, and Bitget's Country Manager. He focuses on breaking the barrier of entry for crypto users through free education content and established brands. Before diving into the crypto world, Jamie Elkaleh was a professional rugby coach who worked with England's National Rugby Team. His professional experience working with young people started with his foundational degree in youth work at Liverpool John Moores University. Jamie has been building the platforms needed to educate and onboard young people to the crypto space ever since. His two educational platforms, CryptoJamie and CryptoBrosUK, have been the foundation of his brand, leading to his partnership with Binance as a crypto content creator. Through that partnership, he was able to reach more than 500k viewers each week, educating and encouraging the future and current leaders of the crypto space. With his current role as Bitget's Relationship Manager, Jamie works to build relationships and broaden the horizon of the platform while onboarding a wide range of users, influencers, and start-ups. Career Since ...

Finding the next hot narrative that will be cryptos defi summer

In this Episode of Flywheel with DeFiDave and KapitalK, we invited on crypto's tastemaker loldefi. We spoke about his transition from fashion to crypto, the differences and similarities between the two industries, the experience of reviewing ICOs, the success of loldefi merch, and the creation of the Who Anon book.https://twitter.com/loldefiTakeawaysThe fashion industry can be exclusive and focused on networking, while the crypto industry is more collaborative and approachable.The ICO boom of 2017 was filled with scams and questionable projects, but also provided opportunities for significant returns.The success of loldefi merch during DeFi Summer demonstrated the strong connection between the crypto community and fashion.The who anon book aims to document the culture and stories of the crypto space in a physical format, providing a unique and tangible experience. The collapse and trial of SPF had a significant impact on the crypto space, highlighting the need for caution and due diligence in the industry.Maintaining a decentralized environment is crucial to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future.Branding and compliance play a vital role in building trust and longevity in the crypto industry.The wealth destruction caused by SBF and Caroline serves as a cautionary tale for investors and participants in the space.Individuals involved in the SBF collapse may face legal consequences, and their liability is yet to be determined.Engaging in off-chain activities and hobbies is important for personal well-being and balance in the crypto world.Advice to the younger self includes not letting external pressures define success and embracing the mindset of creating one's own reality.Recommended guests for future episodes include Grug and Rookie, who have unique stories and perspectives to share.~~~~Subscribe to the Flywheel mailing list: https://flywheeldefi.com~~~~Have ETH but don't know what to do with it? Swap it to FrxETH for the highest staking yields in crypto.https://app.frax.finance/frxeth/mint~~~~Calling all threadoors, researchers, and dashboard creators

In this week's analyst table Dan and Sam are joined by Blockworks research analysts Ren and Brick to dive into the latest governance and onchain news. They dive into Rollbit's proposal to switch to a revenue share model for its token holders. They also discuss Lyra V2's imminent launch, Orca and CowSwap's new fee structures, Synthetix's move away from inflation funding, and the debate around what's driving Solana's recent growth surge. They debate whether if Solana is experiencing a DeFi summer reminiscent start. To close out the team covers Aevo protocol's strong revenue growth and upcoming product launches. Thanks for tuning in! As always remember this podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. - - Follow Sam: https://twitter.com/swmartin19 Follow Dan: https://twitter.com/smyyguy Follow Brick: https://twitter.com/0x___Brick Follow Ren: https://twitter.com/purplepill3m Follow Blockworks Research: https://twitter.com/blockworksres Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3foDS38 Subscribe on Apple: https://apple.co/3SNhUEt Subscribe on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3NlP1hA Get top market insights and the latest in crypto news. Subscribe to Blockworks Daily Newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter/ - - Join us at DAS (Digital Asset Summit) in London this March! DAS is the #1 institutional conference in crypto, hosted by Blockworks. Use the link below to learn more, and use 0X20 to get 20% off your ticket! Sign up now because the price goes up every month. See you there! Learn more + get your ticket here: https://blockworks.co/event/digital-asset-summit-2024-london/home - - Timestamps (0:00) Introduction (1:51) Rollbit Revenue Share Model (7:33) Lyra v2, ORCA, and CowSwap Governance Updates (12:46) Arbitrum Research and Dev Collective Prop (15:58) SNX Base Launch, Inflation, & Buybacks (17:24) DAS London Ad (18:20) Jido Airdrop Review (28:04) Solana: Thesis Update (43:29) Aevo Shipping Products & Revenue Growth - - Resources https://www.umbraresearch.xyz/writings/solana-fees-part-1 - - Check out Blockworks Research today! Research, data, governance, tokenomics, and models – now, all in one place Blockworks Research: https://www.blockworksresearch.com/ Free Daily Newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter - - Disclaimer: Nothing said on 0xResearch is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Dan, Sam, and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

This week, it's Spreek: crypto Twitter's own crypto rug early warning system. He discusses his work in on-chain monitoring and stopping hacks in the DeFi industry, his experiences of saving people from potential losses, the highlights and lowlights of DeFi Summer, the challenges of smart contract security, and more. We've also got great advice on how to miss out on generational wealth. Another perfect episode you won't want to miss.Timestamps00:00 Introduction and Background03:00 Getting Started with On-Chain Monitoring08:20 Highlights and Lowlights of DeFi Summer14:08 The Challenges of Smart Contract Security19:26 Building a Community and Interacting with the Crypto Space25:32 The Future of DeFi and Investing in Crypto28:49 Balancing Risk and Opportunities in the Crypto Market32:37 Lessons Learned from Rugs and Scams1:08:37 The Lesson of Life and Crypto1:09:14 Generational Wealth and Selling1:09:56 Holding Ground and Hedging1:10:42 Wrapping It UpMentionsCasa (for seedless multisigs)Rabby walletContactSpreekBichulHabsul

  Xavier will undoubtedly break the trend of gracing a Crypto Forbes Magazine cover without a proper visit to Frederick Fekkai. With his devastatingly charming accent and endless knowledge of every single protocol to have ever come into existence, it is clear why he has developed a cult like following of gen and degen crypto founders and VCs alike. Not only does he indulge my Real housewives of Crypto in Gstaad meets the Bell Curve wrapped in an unchained blended mix of call her daddy where's my bank line of questions, he educates me in the Je ne Sais Quoi of what staking actually is beyond cute rewards and network security.  His explanation is high level enough that it would satisfy my psychiatrist' Bessel van der Kolking lack of understanding, yet low level enough that it is undoubtedly Vitalik Buterin approved Xavier hails from the great Continent of Adelaide Australia, and then was aristocratically classically educated in FinAnce in Milan post fascism.  He then traveled the globe and found himself at an existential crisis:  Shall I become a Wall Street wanker or dive deep head first into the throws of blockchain and decentralized finAncE et cetera ad nauseum.  He found himself connecting with the mysterious and glamorous Felix Lutsch, the former Chief Commercial Officer of Chorus One, who has since left to pursue Low  Fashion in High places and vice versa. Xavier stopped at nothing to join this unique, elegant, and what could only be described as a crypto native think thank that's operates validator node infrastructure and produces unstoppable MEV research for exchanges, custodians, wallets, foundations, VCs, Hedgefunds and UHNwI' alike. He joined as a Research Analyst before becoming Head of Research and then eventually crowned Chief Investment Officer where he is responsible for its multi milly dollar fund. Xavier and I have had a deeply complicated relationship. We first met for a candlelight dinner at the Core Club during a balmy night in DeFi Summer. It was here I laid my vapid attempt to convince him of my deep expertise in the Cosmos ecosystem, tokenized perpetual derivatives and of my elite DAO memberships of which I forged using my Nigerian Passport. Over a shared beef tartare, a 1984 bottle of Malbec and a side order of my mushed up Lexapro and vegemite, he appeared not the least bit convinced of my questionable skillset and resume covered in blood in sequins to illustrate a dark yet exciting work ethic. Nevertheless, Xavier, with his unpretentious intelligence comparable to a young John Stuart Mill and a keen eye to recognize obvious talent, was intrigued at what kind of dealflow I could bring him. I happened to not casually mention my wide circle of dear friends of Sultans and low tier Sequoia Analysts investing in web un deux et trois during all courses. Our (working) relationship has not been without the occasional screaming mascara tear streaked fight, replete with some blue in the face light foaming at the mouth. Yet we always come to an EIP resolution and he has tolerated my antics with the elegance of His Majesty. After all I do (mostly) deliver.  Alas, I must zkrollup my sleeves ,save my histrionics for the stage and recognize the opportunity I have been hashtag blessed with.  Xavier is a critical thinker, and a writer, of which well be seeing more of in the New Year. He is a sharp communicator, unique in the crypto space. His analyses of projects are not filled with nonsensical buzzwords and lack of substance, but instead with real examination from bottom of the blockchain. He is most bullish on Avalanche subnets, liquid staking, and Cosmos, and optimistically convinced he could shill the royal family on indulging some light Osmosis trading in between pheasant hunting. Xavier is the loveliest, the coolest, the smartest, and is going to set this next bull market ablaze. Enjoy the episode. 

Keone Hon is the founder and CEO of Monad Labs — the development team behind a new Layer-1 blockchain that aims to bring pipelined execution to the Ethereum Virtual Machine. In this episode, Keone shares how his background at various HFT firms led him to identify problems with existing blockchain infrastructure and ultimately inspired him to rebuild the EVM entirely to optimize it for high-performance trading activity. Monad has raised $19 million from investors including Dragonfly Capital, Naval Ravikant, Cobie, Hasu and others. OUTLINE: 03:33 - Monad Overview 05:17 - Another Layer-1? 06:26 - ‘Pipelining' 08:32 - Web3 Social 11:38 - Bridges to Monad 12:11 - High Performance DeFi 13:34 - DeFi Summer 2.0? 16:01 - Monad's Funding 16:49 - Onchain HFT 19:05 - The Future of Trading 22:55 - Onchain Sports Betting 23:19 - Surviving Crypto Winter 28:30 - Closing Thoughts

In this week's episode, Mike and Michael breakdown all things DeFi. They discuss the ecosystem writ large and whether we're seeing a return to 2021's ‘DeFi Summer', and the value proposition of sustainable fees as the key differentiator. The guys go on to review Rune Christensen's Solana Fork MakerDAO proposal, Visa's crypto stablecoin settlement expanding to Solana, as well as recent regulation setbacks. We then close out on the spot Ether ETF Bid From Ark Invest, 21Shares - hot off of Grayscales spot BTC ETF win - and the wider cycle sentiment. Enjoy! - - Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (02:09) DeFi 1.0 Resurgence? (08:32) "Permissionless Promotion" (09:25) DeFi 1.0 Resurgence? (27:12) Rune Christensen's Solana Fork MakerDAO Proposal (37:48) Stablecoin Settlement Expanding to Solana (46:01) Coinbase, Framework Venture Funds Invest $5M in Socket Protocol (49:00) Regulation Setback: CFTC Settlement Against DeFi Protocols  (55:52 Spot Ether ETF Bid From Ark Invest, 21Shares (1:00:23) Cycle Sentiment  - - Follow Mike: https://twitter.com/MikeIppolito_ Follow Jason: https://twitter.com/JasonYanowitz Follow Vance: https://twitter.com/pythianism Follow Michael: https://twitter.com/im_manderson Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3R1D1D9 Subscribe on Apple: https://apple.co/3pQTfmD Subscribe on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3cpKZXH -- Research, news, data, governance and models – now, all in one place. As a listener of Bell Curve, you can use code "BELLCURVE10" for a 10% discount when signing up to Blockworks Research https://www.blockworksresearch.com/ -- Use code BELLCURVE30 to get 30% off Permissionless 2023 in Austin: https://blockworks.co/event/permissionless-2023 - - Resources: Van Eck ETH Price Prediction (correction) https://bitly.ws/UhKH Rune Christensen's Solana Fork MakerDAO Proposal https://blockworks.co/news/makerdao-solana-fork-endgame Sam Hart: Solana Codebase Fork for NewChain https://forum.makerdao.com/t/explore-a-fork-of-the-solana-codebase-for-newchain/21822/33 Stablecoin Settlement Expanding to Solana https://blockworks.co/news/visa-usdc-solana-stablecoin-expansion Spot Ether ETF Bid From Ark Invest, 21Shares https://blockworks.co/news/21shares-ark-filing-for-spot-ether-etf - - Disclaimer: Nothing said on Bell Curve is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Mike, Jason, Michael, Vance and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

On our final episode of Season 5, we're speaking with Raz about a variety of topics ranging from building games for his siblings as a child to starting his own business at age 14 to forming anonymous relationships online and so much more. Raz is the CEO and co-founder of Guild, a membership management tool that helps you automate requirements, roles, and rewards for your community.We start off by talking about Raz's childhood - how he learned to program at the young age of 6 or 7, how he grew up designing board games for his younger siblings because he wasn't allowed very much screen time to play the computer games he wanted to play, and how his love of all things games - the strategy, the lore, the escape into an alternative universe - all impacted his future decisions and successes as an investor and builder.Raz made it big back in DeFi summer of 2020 and shares some of his best investment tips with us, like how to identify entry and exit points and how to stay objective in this space. He talks about how investing has helped him become a better builder and some of the things he's still learning as a successful founder today.We then get into a conversation around DAOs, how he defines what constitutes a DAO, and whether he thinks DAOs have peaked yet. I ask him about how Guild has been able to strike such a good balance between being a well organized successful company while running on a relatively very flat organizational structure and championing a lot of the ethos of DAO organization that typically tends to lead to chaos, and he attributes a lot of that to the thinking and work of his brother and co-founder, Bruno, who we'll hopefully get on the podcast next season.This was the perfect episode to end the season on and definitely one of my personal favorites. And I know I've been saying this a lot lately, but the fact is this season was probably my favorite one yet. It's so inspiring to me that even in the midst of a bear market where sentiments around crypto and web3 are so low that there are still so many bright minds that are still so dedicated to building and furthering the potential that crypto and blockchain can have on the future of the internet.We'll be starting our next round of guest nominations and voting in a little over a week, so make sure you're following us on Twitter @rehashweb3 or join our Discord community so you can stay up to date on all the happenings around that. If you don't have a Rehash podcast NFT yet and want to help us decide our guests for next season, make sure you grab an NFT at https://www.rehashweb3.xyz/ before the next round of nominations starts, and if you have any questions, DM us on Twitter and we'll help you out there. COLLECT THIS EPISODEhttps://www.rehashweb3.xyz/ FOLLOW USRehash: https://twitter.com/rehashweb3Diana: https://twitter.com/ddwchenRaz: https://twitter.com/leadinscientistGuild: https://twitter.com/guildxyz SPONSORSQuests: https://rehash.quests.comLore: https://lore.xyz/rehashLivepeer: https://livepeer.org TIMESTAMPS0:00 Intro4:50 Building board games as a child7:26 How Raz got into crypto through Dogecoin11:22 Biggest lessons learned from gaming12:42 Becoming an investor before becoming a builder21:47 Raz's investment strategy27:23 Raz's hot takes about DAOs29:57 Have DAOs peaked?30:55 Is Guild a DAO?31:30 DAOs vs corporations34:01 Why Raz believes in Gen-Z so much45:42 Questions from Twitter53:59 Explain Your Tweet1:01:07 Follow Raz DISCLAIMER: The information in this video is the opinion of the speaker(s) only and is for informational purposes only. You should not construe it as investment advice, tax advice, or legal advice, and it does not represent any entity's opinion but those of the speaker(s). For investment or legal advice, please seek a duly licensed professional.

Es geht weiter mit einer neuen Ausgabe der Rubrik “To Infinity and Beyond”. Yannick Socolov und unser heutiger Gast Paul Faecks, Co-Founder Alloy Capital, sprechen über DeFi und Institutional Adoption. Im Verlauf des Interviews haben die beiden Experten folgenden Fragen behandelt:DeFi und “On-Chain” Wie hat sich das DeFi-Ökosystem seit "DeFi Summer 2020" weiterentwickelt?Welche Möglichkeiten bietet "On-Chain" für Institutionen?Wie wird sich das Ökosystem in den kommenden Jahren entwickeln?Erste Institutionen im KryptobereichWelche Institutionen betreten als erste den Kryptomarkt?Wie und wo wird das Kapital von Institutionen eingesetzt?Welche Faktoren fehlen noch, um eine breitere Adoption im institutionellen Bereich zu fördern?Institutions in Deutschland Wie treten deutsche Institutionen in den Kryptomarkt ein?Wo liegt ihr Fokus?Welche regulatorischen Implikationen und Überlegungen zur Verwahrung (Custody) gibt es?Welche Strategien nutzen Institutionen für den Einsatz von Vermögenswerten?Wie steht es um das Staking für Institutionen?

Our guest today is the anonymous cofounder of Prisma Finance. In this Quick Hit, we spotlight a new LSTfi protocol called Prisma Finance. We discuss will Prisma ignite the LST Wars, referring to the Curve Wars among protocols competing to capture voting power to allocate Curve liquidity rewards and bootstrap early DeFi protocols. Self-described as "the end game for LSTs," Prisma will offer a highly anticipated non-custodial and decentralized Ethereum LST-backed stablecoin. Prisma's CoFounder discusses all you need to know about the upcoming launch and their stablecoin which will be incentivized on Curve and Convex Finance to create a capital-efficient flywheel where users can receive trading fees, CRV, CVX, and PRISMA on top of their Ethereum staking rewards. Will Prisma trigger a new DeFi Summer? Tune in before Prisma's summer launch date TBD (in late July / early August 2023)! ------

Our guests this week are Trevor Bacon and Kellan Grenier, co-founders of Parcl. Parcl is a blockchain-native platform that allows users to trade real estate on Solana, democratizing access to the world's largest asset class. Parcl offers a unique architecture that enables users to make perpetual predictions on the median price per square foot of real estate in different markets across the US. Parcl also allows users to take long or short positions and provides a novel architecture that is purpose-built for low volatility assets without a liquid spot market.  Show Notes:01:00 - Background / Origin Story04:33 - Why Solana?                    06:20 - Who is Parcl built for?08:29 -  How does Parcl work?10:59 - How can Parcl help more traditional real estate users?13:28 - Permission-less and composable14:50 - Spinning up a new market17:38 -  Real estate royale.19:13 - What's next for Parcel?20:56 - A builder they admire in the Solana ecosystem Full Transcript:Brian Friel (00:00):Hey everyone, and welcome to The Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the web three space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom. I'm super excited to introduce our guest, Trevor Bacon and Kellan Grenier, the co-founders of Parcl. Parcl is a synthetic asset protocol built on Solana, that allows users to invest in a digital square foot of real estate in neighborhoods worldwide. Trevor and Kellan, welcome to the show. Trevor Bacon (00:33):Thanks for having us. Appreciate it. Kellan Grenier (00:35):Great to be here, Brian. Brian Friel (00:36):Super excited to talk to you guys today. I just checked out Parcl app, and seeing all the feeds across the US, New York, Brooklyn, all these really awesome areas where you can trade. I think it makes perfect sense with what Solana was built for, has totally [inaudible 00:00:51] NASDAQ at blockchain speed. Before we dive into everything about Parcl, I'd love to learn a little bit about you guys. Who are you guys, and what made you start Parcl? Trevor Bacon (01:00):Thanks, again, for having us, Brian. I'll start. I'll pass it to Kellan. So prior to starting Parcl, Kellan and I worked together at a hedge fund focused on technology equities, internet software payments, semiconductors. And during COVID, there was a lot of real estate volatility, and there was, really, no way to trade real estate like we were trading stocks. And so we started to look into ways in which we could do that. There were options, like fractionalized real estate, or tokenized real estate, but they're limited by scale, because you need capital to buy properties that are fractionalized, and you need time to close those deals. (01:36):So we took a different approach, which is a top-down approach. We have created indexes that track the price per square foot, based on public real estate information and real estate transactions, basically, listings and sales. Those go into a database, and outcomes... A price per square foot, or a market price for neighborhoods and cities across the country today, in the US. Over time, we are going to be expanding into international geographies. And so that price goes out to the blockchain, and traders can, long or short, see these, based on their view of various locations. Kellan Grenier (02:11):I'll quickly give my background, Trevor covered most of it, but... Traditional finance background, most recently, at a hedge fund, before that, at a Japanese bank, and then at a market research firm before that, always covering tech hardware. That's how I got indoctrinated into blockchain, was modeling, how many, GPUs... The networks we're going to consume. And then, around COVID, with all the real estate volatility, and volatility across all assets, and no way to express a trade, that's what led to Parcl. It seems so obvious. Missing from the structure of markets was a liquidity venue for residential real estate. Brian Friel (02:46):Yeah, I think, myself and many others can resonate with that, especially with the amount of capital involved to get involved with real estate as a young person. It's very prohibitive. Trevor, maybe starting with you guys, you mentioned that you were at a hedge fund before this. Had either of you guys interacted with crypto before this? And was crypto one of the first things that came to mind? Kellan, you just said, this was obvious in hindsight, but was crypto the first tool that you reached for, or did you actually attempt... To be able to trade this with other methods? Trevor Bacon (03:15):Yeah. As Kellan mentioned, he had been indoctrinating the crypto for about five years, I as well. When you're on Wall Street, and there's trends, the banks, typically, showcase the companies that are prevalent in those trends. So I got early access to the management teams of consensus, and Ripple, amongst others. That's how it worked, but that's... When I got introduced to blockchain, that was the 2017 timeframe. So we refer to ourselves as using blockchain rails. The primary collateral on the Parcl protocol is USDC. And so it's, basically, dollars versus real estate prices. (03:51):For us, blockchain introduces an efficient exchange layer, and a settlement layer, that is scalable, and you can create a product like ours, with relatively, substantially, less resources than you would a traditional centralized exchange. And so at the same time we were starting this, DeFi was becoming much more prevalent, on the heels of DeFi Summer, which led us to start to explore the various ways in which you can pull capital in a distributed fashion. For us, it made sense. I think that's the main point of technology, is to drive efficiency. And blockchain really does that, for our use case, in particular. Brian Friel (04:29):On that note, was there anything in particular about Solana... Bright start on Solana? Trevor Bacon (04:33):Yeah. The technology thesis on Solana, which, I think, still holds true today is, it's fast, it's cheap, it's scalable. And we viewed that as something that would persist into the future. And so that fit well in this model, especially for real estate, given... It has lower volatility, and therefore, a lower return profile. So at the time, there weren't many viable EVM scaling solutions in the market. So this was in summer of 2021, arbitrary and optimism weren't quite there yet. And so that's why we decided to go on Solana. Brian Friel (05:08):That's awesome. Kellan Grenier (05:09):One thing I want to add there is, real estate is lower volatility, and therefore, has a lower return profile, but we've ran and done all sorts of analysis. It's sharp ratio, which is a measure of risk adjusted returns, is through the roof, in any given year, especially over the past two decades, it's just blowing everything else away. And it's really interesting, because residential real estate is the only asset that the majority of the population... Nearly everyone has access to a 5X leverage, through a mortgage. That's the gate to participate in the market, but you need the down payment, still. That's a pretty big gate. So introduce Parcl, basically, create the exact same return profile, tracking these underlying price feeds, the prices in these markets that are transactions in real world homes, and offer that to the masses. It's a pretty powerful product. Brian Friel (05:53):Yeah, let's dig into that a little more. That's a really great point you raised, Kellan. You have this background on Wall Street, you know what pro traders are looking for, you talk about sharp ratios of how sophisticated investors are looking access to this. But really, at the end of the day, I would argue that it's the little guy, it's young people, probably a lot of people who are interested in crypto too, who just want access to these markets, don't have the capital. You guys have clearly built a lot, but is there a particular type of user that you guys are looking to serve at Parcl? Kellan Grenier (06:20):Yes and no. There's a curve in terms of who would be interested in using this product. And obviously, it's fairly blockchain native today, especially in how it's delivered. You have a Phantom wallet, you have assets on Solana's blockchain, you connect to the dApp, and you interact with a smart contract. So small pool of people, but growing, hopefully, growing a lot over the next couple of years. But over time, this is a product that can onboard millions, and hundreds of millions, and maybe, eventually, billions of people into this ecosystem, because it's such a compelling offering. Everyone has a relationship with real estate, everyone's off sides, either they're too long, if they own their home, or they're too underexposed, if they rent. I think that opens up the aperture to who the core user is, right? Today, it's blockchain-native folks that have an interest in trading anything, but many of them in trading real estate, specifically. (07:07):Over time, it's going to be, very, much more like a tailored offering for people that are seeking this exact exposure, that, maybe, this is the first time they've ever interacted with a blockchain. And I think that that is what has everyone so excited, whether it's folks on Solana's team... You mentioned that you just started digging in, and as... You pretty excited, Brian. So it's truly like a killer app, consumer app for blockchain. And then eventually, institutions will use it, right? Because there's no venue for liquidity, in any scale, in residential real estate, it's just... There's definitely no short-side or sell-side liquidity. All the liquidity is long, and it takes forever, and high barriers to entry. So if you play that all out, there's a very large group of users in capital that is interacting with this product. Brian Friel (07:50):That's great. Yeah, let's go through that user journey there. You mentioned... Someone shows up for the first time, they have a Phantom wallet, maybe they're a longtime crypto user, and they're excited to participate in their first form of real estate, or maybe, this is, really, just a means to an end, they get a Phantom wallet just to purely go through this. What are some of the particular intricacies of the Parcl model? So you mentioned, this is a lot different from REITs, or fractional ownership. When a user connects a wallet, and they hit "Buy," and say they want to purchase real estate, essentially, in New York, or in the Brooklyn area, they think that area is going up, what are the terms of that purchase? What does the liquidity look like there? What do they need to know after they've decided to hit "Buy?" Kellan Grenier (08:29):It's a perpetual prediction, Brian. So these pools, every day, the prices update. And the price that you are trading is the median price per square foot in... I'll use New York as an example. What does that composed of? All five boroughs, every transaction, every sale that hits the county records, and then all listings, which represent the asking price, and that... All converges on this median, which is meant to be the market price. Every day, that price updates. There's a new price based on all the transactions that happened yesterday, and over the trailing couple weeks. And now, you have a new price. What you've noticed is that real estate, actually, moves on a daily basis, and perhaps, even hour by hour. An agent closes a home, they tell their other agent, now there's a new market price. So when people go to trade, that's what they're trading. And they're effectively making a perpetual prediction. (09:16):I believe I'm getting long New York at 600 and whatever dollars. And maybe I put in exactly 600, and whatever USDC. So now, I own one square foot of New York. And I can leave that open as long as I want. I could close it tomorrow, I could close it in a week. I'm effectively trading, investing, betting, however you want to define it, that that price will rise. On the other side, there's someone taking the other side of that. There's someone that's short. And what we found is that these markets, over time, generally, balance out. There's people that have different views on real estate. Sometimes, they tilt very long, and others, they tilt short. Everyone's short San Francisco right now, and it's tilted fairly short since this product launch. Brian Friel (09:53):I need to sign up for Parcl now, as I'm recording this from San Francisco. You guys are the ones in New York. Kellan Grenier (09:59):And Boston and Chicago, which have performed really well over the past couple months, are the two most long right now. And then, the rest of the markets are fairly balanced, but that can change overnight. The market reacts pretty quickly to changes in price, and changes in sentiment and news, and whatnot. So it's a really cool product. And in the simplest terms, you are effectively predicting that price will either rise or fall, and placing your wager accordingly. Brian Friel (10:23):That's an awesome picture you paint. And yeah, to that point, I'm going to need to load up my wallet here, and protect myself a little bit, from being in San Francisco. But you mentioned the idea of, prices are updating on a 24-hour basis here. Part of Solana's key advantages are that... It actually allows a product like this to exist, but there's another type of user that you alluded to a little bit prior, someone who's, maybe, already long real estate in the form of a big mortgage, and they're afraid that, maybe, they bid off a little more than they can chew, and they lever it up on a place in SF, before the tech crash, and they want to protect that. How can Parcl help a user like that? Trevor Bacon (10:58):That's a great question. I forgot the one other reason why we chose Solana with the wallet infrastructure. So shout out to Phantom, the plug, but it's actually true. What Parcl offers is native short exposure, if one so chooses. And today, there really aren't many ways in which... The short specific geographies. REITs are a common example of a real estate investment. However, REITs are usually types of assets spread across the country, think of data centers or apartment buildings. There's no geographic specificity. And so what Parcl offers is the ability for people to have specific geographies that they'd like to invest in, long or short. And therefore, you can make much more targeted investments, either for or against. Kellan Grenier (11:43):I would just add, this is so composable, and it's in the eye of the beholder, what this product can do. If you own a home, like we said earlier, and you just said, Brian, you're way overweight real estate, as a percentage of your net assets, most likely, and you have a big mortgage, it's your largest asset, it also is your largest liability. What if you wanted to hedge? How would you do that? You really cannot. There's really no way to do that without touching your loan structure, and that wouldn't be a perfect hedge anyway. So this is a product where you can get that short exposure whenever you feel like... You're offsides more than you want to be, you can come to this product, assuming you're eligible to use it, connect your wallet, place that short bet, lock in your paper gains, or protect yourself on the downside. (12:25):We talk to a lot of people, and they hear that, and they say, "Well, isn't this also like a synthetic insurance?" Say that there's a hurricane bearing down on Miami, no insurer would write you a policy in that situation. You could short Miami real estate to protect yourself. Obviously, you probably won't be alone. And the market's going to skew. And you might have to pay some funding fees, but it's available to you as a product. So there's so many novel elements that introduces... Like exposure that you just can't get anywhere else, whether it's protecting the gains that you've realized in your home, you don't want to sell it and move, or as an insurance product. It's limitless, how you can use it. Brian Friel (13:04):Kellan, you bring up a good point there, about the composable nature of this. And earlier, you guys mentioned, for every buyer, there's a seller. And obviously, this is a provision marketplace, anyone come up with a wallet, and connect wallet, and get started. So under the hood, how is that facilitated? I believe you guys are using an AMM. And some part of this... Because I see a section on your site about providing liquidity. Can you speak a little bit more of the mechanics behind that? Trevor Bacon (13:29):We permission the pools ourselves, Parcl, as the development company permissions the pools. And so we have the authority to launch pools. Over time, we see a potential path, where it's more permissionless, and people can use the AMM to spin up their own pools, have their own front ends, and have their own products. So I think one of the beautiful things about the protocol is that it can facilitate a lot of different types of products that we can't, or don't have the interest in creating, such as structured products options, as Kellan mentioned, insurance. So there's a whole ecosystem here, to be built. And I think it's incumbent upon us to facilitate developers over time, and once we think that the product's ready to release into a more permissionless environment, to facilitate that developer ecosystem, that we can underpin. Brian Friel (14:16):Yeah. I could see this whole world, where... It's already on chain, like you said, Solana is this giant, composable state machine. And it'd be really awesome to plug this, also, just into existing DeFi protocols, I'm thinking. You're on a drift, or you're on Jupiter, and you want to be making multiple swaps at once, you can, basically, bundle these into the existing DeFi activities you're already making on Solana. Maybe talk a little bit about that process of... What it's like today, to spin up a new market. What are all the pieces that are involved, both from a technical side... But I'm sure there's also, probably, a lot on the operational side as well. Maybe, Trevor, can you speak to that? Trevor Bacon (14:51):So now that we have the infrastructure in place, it's not terribly hard to spin up a new market. One thing to consider is that the data comes from a entity called Parcl Labs. And Parcl Labs has an API that has all the price feeds available to the public, and also for the Parcl protocols, Oracle, to consume. So if we were going to, let's say, launch a Paris price feed, so the price feed gets enabled in the API, on the Parcl lab side, the API connects to the Oracle, the Oracle connects to the smart contract, and there's the pool for traders to trade. So it's relatively simple. It's not without work, but we have the infrastructure in place to spin up. Currently, we have 15 markets we're launching, Austin, and then, I think we'll be in the international realm later this month. Kellan Grenier (15:39):This is a novel architecture. It is purpose-built for a low volatility asset without a liquid spot market. That defines real estate, that create redeem... Arbitrage isn't explicitly there. You could create a new house, I guess, and then come and hedge it on Parcl, like we just discussed, but that's a pretty elaborate process, way more complex than buying Solana on Jupiter, and then hedging the purp, or whatever. So what's great about the structure is that every participant in the pool is a liquidity provider. So you come in, and you make a trade, you're getting long. What happens is that, atomically, you're depositing USDC into the pool, and you're minting a liquidity token that represents your ownership interest in that pool. And then, simultaneously that notional value is getting locked into a smart contract, a decentralized smart contract, and that, effectively, recognizes where you entered the trade, what your price was, how much leverage you used, all of the elements of the trade that's relevant. And it stays locked in that contract until you, as the authority, comes in and closes the position effectively. (16:36):So that's how it works. And what's cool about that is that a new pool could be launched tomorrow, and start from zero. And then, Brian, you could come in and be the first trade. You could be a liquidity provider, or you could get long, you could get short. And you would be skewing that pool 100%, right? So unless someone else came in, you would, effectively, be paying yourself funding, perpetually, such that there was no gains to recognize or lose. But as soon as someone else comes in, that calculus changes, and now, you have a market. Now, it's a perpetual prediction market, a perpetual prediction AMM. And now, you have longs and shorts, effectively, paying each other. That's not exactly how it works, technically, but to the late person, that would be how it would work. So the beauty of that is, you can have a new pool every minute. And the main constraint is liquidity, but it's not, actually, a constraint, technically. So it's a really neat architecture. Brian Friel (17:21):The possibilities here are really exciting. And you mentioned one of the main constraints, not technically a constraint, but it is, is liquidity. So let's talk about some of the initiatives that we have, going on, to improve that. So I see that there's a new initiative here, called Real Estate Royale. Trevor, can you speak a little bit to what that is? Trevor Bacon (17:38):Yeah, so the Real Estate Royale is a contest series that we have, to familiarize people with the asset class, which is real estate, getting them to understand the product, how to use it. Every week, we have various prizes. And then, we have a monthly prize at the end, which is... USDC paid out to the winners. We've seen some pretty substantial gains with respect to monthly return percentages. I think last month, the winner, I think he was up 30%, which is pretty impressive, given that it's a relatively low volatility asset class. It's a way for us... Because it's a novel product, and it doesn't have, really, an analog in the real world, or something that's existing, it's a way for us to reach out to our users, get them excited and engaged, and then hear their feedback. So we conduct user interviews all the time, understand what folks need to get better educated, with tools they need to make their investment decisions. And our product team, which is excellent, is listening to that feedback and building for the user. Brian Friel (18:34):That's awesome. And I think now's a great time, on that note of the contest that are going on, to announce that. By the time that this episode's going to be going live, we have a special promotion with Parcl, which we're really excited to share. For the rest of the month, the first 500 new traders to Parcl, so you got to use a new address on Phantom when signing up, will receive a 10% discount for their first trade. You can learn more about that at parcl.cc/phantom. Trevor and Kellan, what's next for Parcl? You got, potentially, all these new markets coming out. Trevor, you mentioned Austin's coming live soon, potentially international. Where is your guys' focus? Maybe starting with you, Kellan. What's on the horizon? Kellan Grenier (19:13):Yeah. I think there are the three main things, is new users and opening up the access to as many people as possible, and helping them understand that this is something that's available to them, except for a couple jurisdictions around the world, unfortunately, the US being one of them. Hopefully, that changes much sooner rather than later. Yeah. New users, top of funnel, just introducing people to this product, letting them know that this is available, and that they can trade real estate just like they would trade anything else. (19:38):The other thing is expanding the offering. Trevor was teasing a couple new cities, new metros, some globally recognizable names, you can think, Paris, France, eventually, the United Kingdom, London, and then developed Asia. Eventually, it'll blanket the world, right? There will be a Parcl market wherever you live. So that's another thing that's super exciting. Trevor can touch on this, but how many different chains are, potentially, able to use this product as well? We started on Solana, for all the obvious reasons that we noted, but much larger crypto ecosystem in total, that can be addressed. So I'll pass it to Trevor to talk on that. Trevor Bacon (20:13):Yeah. I think, expanding geographically, because you have the ability and the capability to offer products that are dispersed globally, and then expanding the user base in terms of... Stepping into other ecosystems, such as EBM, which have their own pool of people and capital that are native there. So that's what's on the roadmap for the rest of the year. Brian Friel (20:35):All exciting things. As I said, we got a special promotion going, so it's a perfect time to check it out. I'll be signing up, protecting myself against the doll drums of living in SF here. Trevor and Kellan, one question I ask all of our guests, I'd love to hear this from each of you, and maybe starting with you, Trevor, is, who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem? Trevor Bacon (20:56):First, I'd like to shout out our team. The team is operating at an exceptionally high level, and they continue to execute against any bar, despite any macro hiccups that we may have, either globally, or in the idiosyncratic crypto space. One builder that... It's not the Solana ecosystem, per se, but I think, given all the scrutiny, Brian Armstrong has stepped up, and has largely become the future of crypto. He hasn't backed down. He's shown a lot of fortitude against the government, which he's asked to be regulated many, many, many times. And it's a tough fight, but he's standing strong. And it's admirable, in my opinion. Kellan Grenier (21:33):Yeah, I would totally second that. Coinbase is like the flag carrier right now, and setting the tone for the rest of the industry. And I salute them, and wish them all the luck in the world. Two quick ones that are top of mind, just because we were on a panel, actually, last week with them, the Home Base DAO team, and it's in the real world assets category, which is one that we care about a ton. Alex and Rodrigo, what they're doing is pretty interesting. They're looking at it more from the fractionalized side, and actually tokenizing real world homes, and putting them on chain, on Solana specifically, but they're doing great work, really talented team. And then, Tom at Credics. What Credics has done is really inspiring. They've been at it for a while now, really institutional friendly offering that can help onboard billions and billions of dollars into the ecosystem. So hats off to both of those teams. And there's infinitely more beyond that. And then, obviously, Parcl's development team, we think, is best in class. Brian Friel (22:23):Couldn't agree more. Home Base DAO was, actually, just on the podcast just before you guys, so shout out to them, Credics as well. I always see them building. I think we can all say, we're very lucky to have Coinbase representing our industry, and not giving up the good point. Trevor and Kellan, this has been an awesome conversation. Where can people go to learn more about Parcl? Kellan Grenier (22:41):You said it, Brian. Running a promotion for Phantom users, and launching that alongside this podcast, the first 500 new traders receive 10% discount on their first trade. There's a unique URL, be sure to use that. It's "Parcl," P-A-R-C-L, ".cc/phantom." And it's "Parcl" without an "E." So P-A-R-C-L.cc/phantom. That's the best place to go, because you'll get 10% off your first trade. Otherwise, just go to parcl.co, P-A-R-C-L.C-O, or follow us on Twitter, @Parcl. Brian Friel (23:11):That's awesome. Trevor and Kellan, the co-founders of Parcl, thank you so much for your time, for coming on The Zeitgeist. Trevor Bacon (23:15):Thanks a lot, Brian. Thanks for having us. Kellan Grenier (23:17):Thanks, Brian.    

Mark Richardson, the project lead at Bancor, joins Piers Ridyard to discuss Carbon, the next stage in DEX evolution, in this episode of the DeFi Download. Carbon provides order book-like functionality on-chain and has already seen over 100 strategies created since its launch on April 20th.SummaryFrom Bancor V1 to Uniswap, the evolution of cryptocurrency liquidity provision has been characterised by significant innovations that sparked DeFi Summer. Although the Automated Market Maker (AMM) was a game-changer, Bancor is turning away from the AMM, recognising the complexities involved in providing liquidity.Carbon, as an on-chain order book functionality provider, offers greater flexibility and control over liquidity provision than traditional AMMs. Carbon's app runs in the user's browser using an open-source software development kit (SDK), which is lightweight enough to run smoothly on a smartphone.Key takeawaysCarbon is a gas-efficient, lightweight DEX that prioritises efficiency while still executing swaps trustlessly.In retrospect, some of the most significant innovations appear obvious, but until an innovation is defined and described, it may not be immediately apparent. The irony of invention is that it is only apparent after it has been discovered. Previously, it may have been unclear why others were not in the right frame of mind to make the discovery themselves.Carbon's development priorities include identifying the demographic that uses Carbon, exploring other blockchain ecosystems, and supporting features that did not make the critical path for the MVP but still need support.Chapters[01:12] What killed the AMM, and what comes next in the world of DeFi liquidity provision?[07:05] How providing liquidity can align incentives and create a social basis for market making in DeFi[10:45] What is the simplest way to describe impermanent loss to someone in the context of AMMs?[13:37] Impermanent loss in liquidity provision and missed profit opportunities[16:02] What are Mark Richardson's thoughts on how Bancor's Carbon can contribute to the concentrated liquidity pools model, and what is the next step in liquidity provision?[18:21] What is a short gamma option, and why is it called that?[23:53] The rise of constant function AMMs and the naive phase of decentralised finance and crypto[26:50] What are the limitations of the Automated Market Maker (AMM), and why is it not the ideal financial instrument for liquidity provision in DeFi? How does Carbon solve these limitations, and what does it do differently?[29:20] Carbon's customizable "buy low, sell high" strategy execution[33:39] Is it possible that CLOBs lack statefulness and a concept of time, resulting in only valid or invalid orders and no if-then statements?[35:27] How does Carbon solve the challenge of creating order book-like functionality and making it easy for users to buy within a certain range without having to pick specific orders, while still maintaining the ability to put trades on in microseconds or nanoseconds and avoiding potential performance issues with state-based logic in order matching engines?[38:59] The genius of Carbon: a simple on-ledger solution for order routing[43:29] Does using the SDK in Carbon for executing positions trustlessly while still submitting the execution to the ledger raise concerns among decentralisation maximalists?[46:37] What are Carbon's plans for the next 6–12 months?Further resourcesWebsite: bancor.network Twitter: @Bancor Discord: discord.com/invite/CAm3Ncyrxk 

NFTYQ sits down with Mike Finch, Managing Partner of Pirata Capital, for the first ever episode of the Wild Wild Web. In this episode we discuss how the ICO era and DeFi Summer rhyme with where we are today, the Bullish Case on Ethereum, SEC and Federal Reserve talk, and how Blur operates and effects the NFT market! NFTYQ https://twitter.com/NFTYQ Wild Wild Web Twitter https://twitter.com/theWildWildWeb_ Wild Wild Web Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/1jKA8nm6gXIf6qygU732gv?si=bcc9fd3e97034265 ***Wild Wild Web*** Every week we'll be exploring the edges of the Digital Frontier through in-depth discussions with the most prominent Industry Pioneers and Innovative Builders in #Web3 and NFTs!

If you got into crypto in 2021 or 2022, I'm sorry to tell you, but you missed out on one of the most insane exponential pump parties in all of crypto: The "DeFi Summer" of 2020! With the Metaverse, Storage, A.I. and other niche sectors of the crypto space popping off, will there ever be another DeFi summer? I definitely think there's a chance that could happen, but there's one project in particular could bring the heat on its own…and that project is DYDX! Interested in Crypto Retirement Accounts? Check out iTrust Capital! ➡️ https://itrust.capital/Bitboy

In this episode of Empire, we are joined by Kain Warwick, founder of Synthethix and crypto OG. Kain explains the concept of centralized insanity and how crypto is finally ready for the next bull cycle. We cover Synthetix's evolution, Ethereum's outlook, crypto infrastructure, what will cause the shift to decentralized products, DeFi's most important metric and more! Kain is one guest you won't want to miss! - - Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (02:18) DeFi Summer 2020 (05:29) The Synthetix Evolution (09:29) Ethereum's Outlook and Alt L1 Cycles (23:25) A Shift From Infra to Apps (27:47) Quicknode Ad (29:34) Synthetix Ad (31:13) Centralized vs Decentralized Trading (36:20) Regulators are Stuck in the Past (43:43) Future of Stablecoins (47:08) Centralized Insanity, Base and DeFi Summer 2.0 (52:43) A Focus on Revenue (01:01:30) Synthetix v3 and the Value of Composability (01:18:34) Fire Round - - Follow Kain: https://twitter.com/kaiynne Follow Jason: https://twitter.com/JasonYanowitz Follow Santi: https://twitter.com/santiagoroel Follow Empire: https://twitter.com/theempirepod Subscribe on YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/4fdhhb2j Subscribe on Apple: https://tinyurl.com/mv4frfv7 Subscribe on Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/wbaypprw Get top market insights and the latest in crypto news. Subscribe to Blockworks Daily Newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter/  - - This episode is brought to you by Quicknode. QuickNode is an end-to-end blockchain developer platform that makes building Web3 apps easy. Go to QuickNode.com and use code Empire for a free month on their feature-packed Build Plan! - - This episode is brought to you by Synthetix. Synthetix Perps is the most efficient decentralized perpetual futures engine, with 5/10 bp fees and up to 25x leverage. With a growing list of over 20 tradable markets, Synthetix Perps are available on Optimism via Kwenta.io and Polynomial.fi, with more coming soon! As a permissionless liquidity layer, Synthetix makes it easy for any protocol to integrate perps and earn 5%-10% of trade fees. - - Resources Synthetix https://synthetix.io/ https://twitter.com/synthetix_io - -  Disclaimer: Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Santiago, Jason, and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

Sam Kazemian is the Founder of Frax Finance. In this episode, we go deep with one of DeFi's most accomplished builders. Sam launched Frax Finance in 2020, being one of the earliest stablecoins to launch in the new era following DeFi Summer. We talk with Sam about how Frax has managed to thrive in such a competitive sector of DeFi, while leveraging a positive-sum strategy to not only grow Frax stablecoins but also some of their fiercest competitors. We also discuss their newest stablecoin pegged to 1 ETH called frxETH, which as of this recording, is #4 in total staked ETH among LSTs just behind Rocket Pool (even though frxETH isn't intended as an LST)! THIS IS NOT A RECOMMENDATION OR ENDORSEMENT TO BUY ANY TOKEN OR NFT RELATED TO ANY PLATFORMS DISCUSSED.   ------ 

This week on The Defiant Podcast, Tegan Kline chats with Kain Warwick, crypto OG and founder of Synthetix. Synthetix is a new financial primitive enabling the creation of synthetic assets, offering unique derivatives and exposure to real-world assets on the blockchain. Today, we dive into what's next for Synthetix with the latest V3 launch, and what will cause the next big leg up in DeFi - what we're calling DeFi Summer 2. We go on to discuss the differentiation between different perpetual products that exist in crypto, and how Synthetix made the decision to launch on a Layer 2 so quickly and burn all bridges behind them. And it gets pretty spicy with some tea on FTX and 3AC. Before we dive into it, Kain tells us what he's been up to since we last spoke to him about what it takes to scale Ethereum.

It's been a few years since the DeFi Summer of 2020, where decentralized finance really started to pop off. While it may not be as hot now as it was then, DeFi is still alive and thriving, and we might be seeing it come back into the mainstream very soon. In this video I break down my top DeFi tokens while also breaking down why these projects are worth looking into for the long run.  Interested in Crypto Retirement Accounts? Check out iTrust Capital! ➡️ https://itrust.capital/Bitboy

Today on the show, Ryan and David are Guestless! The two cover the history of crypto bull markets. What patterns are found in every single bull market? Now that there are three very distinct crypto market cycles, what can we learn from them? Crypto democratizes the ability to mint new assets. How are humans dealing with this newfound superpower? Ryan and David answer all of these questions and so much more. ------ Crypto Tax Calculator | Free Crypto Tax Calculator https://bankless.cc/CTCpodcast  ------ JOIN BANKLESS PREMIUM: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/subscribe  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/kraken  UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE https://bankless.cc/uniswap  ️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  EARNIFI | CLAIM YOUR UNCLAIMED AIRDROPS https://bankless.cc/earnifi  ------ Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 10:24 What is Money? 16:40 What is Crypto Doing? 24:40 The Power Patterns 28:20 2013 32:40 Corruption Part of the Cycle 37:15 ICO Mania & Corruption 54:00 2020 DeFi Summer 59:50 NFTs 1:03:20 2023 1:06:00 The Good & The Bad 1:10:05 Closing & Disclaimers ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures 

Nader Dabit, Director of Developer Relations at Aave and Lens ProtocoI talks with Brian Friel about his journey moving from developing in web2 to web3. From creating educational content and authoring one of the first "Intro to Solana" programming articles, to founding Developer DAO and building the infrastructure for the next generation of web3 social apps. Show Notes:00:49 - Intro02:43 - Origin story / Background  06:13 -  AHA moment in Web 3.0 ?10:49 - Lens and Aave                18:30 - Composability between blockchains  21:45 - Advice to newcomers24:15 - A builder he admires in the Web3 ecosystem Full Transcript:Brian (00:00):Hey, everyone, and welcome to The Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the Web3 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom. And I'm super excited to introduce our guest, Nader Dabit, the director of developer relations at Aave & Lens Protocol. Nader, welcome to the show. Nader (00:25):Hey, thank you for having me. Good to be here. Brian (00:27):I'm really excited to talk to you today. A lot of folks may know you from Crypto Twitter. You've been around a lot of different places in the Web3 ecosystem. But for some folks who might not know, you actually wrote one of the earliest intro to Solana programming articles that there were at the time, back in, I believe, summer 2021. And it's special to me, because this is actually the first article that I found on Solana that got me working at Phantom full time. So, before we dive into everything, I want to say thank you and welcome, and it's great to be talking to you today. Nader (00:58):Yeah, I remember very clearly when I wrote that article, because at the time I was trying to learn how to build on Solana. And I had a hard time finding all of the pieces that I needed to build out the types of application that I was used to building, just for a hello world type of thing. And I was actually traveling at the time from Croatia, and also Mexico during that week. And I remember just staying up sometimes all night, just trying to figure out what I thought was some basic stuff. And I was like, I have to document this stuff. It has to be documented somewhere, in a way that I would want it. (01:32):Because it's probably documented in other ways, like bits and pieces. But putting it all together, I was like, okay, this is going to be what I wanted to find. And I remember when I tweeted it out, it was one of the most popular tweets that I maybe have ever had, in the top five. That tutorial, the reception was just enormous. So, there was a lot of interest in Solana for developers, and I think that this was one of the things that enabled a lot of developers at the time to just get up and running, and see how it felt to build a full-stack application on Solana. Brian (02:02):No, I couldn't agree more. It was a time where there was a ton of demand, and just not enough resources or infrastructure. And it's been really cool, to just see all the derivative pieces that have come from that. A ton of folks have taken that article, built their own version, extended it in some ways. And view that and the initial paulx escrow tutorial as the two sparks that kicked off Solana development, and DevRel and all that. But before we get into everything today, you have a really interesting background. You were early to Solana, but then you worked across a number of different protocols already in the Web3 ecosystem. And before that, you were deeply involved in React and Web2 land. Could you walk us through a little bit about who you are and your background? Nader (02:43):Yes, so I've been a developer for about 10 years now, a little over 10 years. And I've specialized in, I would say four main areas of specialization during that time. I started off as a front end and single page application developer, I would call it, working with stuff from just plain JavaScript and HTML, to Angular, to React. And then, I moved into mobile development for a little over three years, specializing in cross platform application development with React native. (03:16):One of those years I was running a company called React Native Training, where I would train teams of engineers, where they had these siloed teams that were focused on either iOS or Android, and I would introduce them to React Native. And there was quite a bit of demand for that. So, a lot of the clients that I had, were large companies that had a lot of overhead with their developer budgets, and they were trying to find ways to not only have less resources needed to build out applications, but also to be able to build faster, and also to have a better singular code base, so we don't have to have two separate code bases. (03:54):So yeah, I had clients like Amazon and Teams at Microsoft, or individual engineers from Microsoft that would come to my training. Teams like Warner Brothers, and banks and stuff, were also my clients. So, that was really fun for about a year. And then, the next thing that I did is, I got interested in cloud computing. So, I ended up moving and working at AWS for a little over three years. And during that time I was doing developer relations there, which is what I'm doing now as well. And after a little over three years there, I got interested in the blockchain space. And I thought that while the work that we were doing at AWS was super important and very real world, there was a lot of applications and companies using it. I thought that the blockchain space was a little more exciting, just because it was newer. I thought the opportunities that were available for this technology, once it became mature enough to actually be usable for the ideas that we had, were really powerful and stuff. (04:50):And I felt like it was so early that there was a lot of room for growth, because a lot of these ideas were there and the technology... The primitives were there, but the maturity of those primitives weren't quite there. So, being part of that growth and stuff, to me it seemed really exciting. So yeah, I moved into blockchain space. Brian (05:07):And what year was that, Nader, real quick before you jumped in? Nader (05:11):So, I joined the blockchain world in April of 2021. So, a year and eight months ago, I guess, seven months ago. Brian (05:22):You made a huge impact in just that little time. I would've put you back at least a couple years on that, but that's really cool. Nader (05:28):Yeah, definitely the first time I got into this from the perspective of a developer was then, I had dabbled in crypto as an investor before that, but knew nothing about anything actually until then. And then, in that time, in the last 18 months, I've worked at the graph protocol, I've worked with Celestia, which is the first modular blockchain. And now, I'm working with Aave and Lens Protocol. Brian (05:48):That's great. And was there anything at that time, you had this great job at AWS, you've written a number of books, React Native in Action, all of these great resources that are used across a number of traditional companies. But was there anything about Web3 in particular that was an aha moment for you, or just made you just say, "I have to work in this space"? Or do you think it was more of a culmination of just years of watching it off to the side? Nader (06:13):Yeah, there was a few things. I'll look at this technology as a new way to build certain applications that wasn't possible in the past. I don't look at it as, oh, Web3 is going to replace everything that we had before. Instead, I think I look at it as it's going to probably disrupt certain types of industries, but it also just opens the door for new types of applications that are really exciting to me. And I think the one thing that stood out the most to me, is that we had public immutable and permanent infrastructure that developers could share, and use, and build on top of, almost like the way that we have code that is open source, that everyone can share, and use it, and clone it, and fork it, and do whatever. If we applied those same principles to actual software infrastructure, that was instead of the... We're kind of used to brittle infrastructure. (07:02):Most of the time when you're building on top of someone else's API, you don't know if it's going to be there tomorrow or even later today. You also have no control over the access of that. Someone can shut you off, someone can prevent you from using it at any time. So, you can't really share backend infrastructure. So, everyone's out there building out their own backend infrastructure for their own ideas, which is great if you need something custom. But there's a lot of things, I think, that would be very valuable for other people to share and not have to rebuild themselves. But it's just not possible through the traditional software infrastructure primitives that we have. Because a database can go down, someone can go and delete things from a database. You can't depend on that data being there, but with blockchain infrastructure you actually have those properties. (07:49):And that's really exciting to me, because what we're seeing exactly I think with Lens, is that if you provide a really high quality backend, and you bring a really high quality API that enables developers to build on top of it, you've done away with a large majority of the work that's needed to build an app, building out the backend. Just imagine if you only had to build out the front end, and you didn't have to worry about this, and everyone could share that backend infrastructure. (08:16):And that's what excited me the most. There weren't really a lot of real world implementations of this though at the time. There was NFTs and DeFi stuff, which is great, but I don't think the coming to market use case is going to be that. I think that will be things that are used a lot in the future, but not that. (08:32):And then, the other thing that excited me about this stuff, it's payments. And I think that also stablecoins, this idea of stablecoins, and offering stability to currencies around the world that don't have that, was pretty exciting to me. And also, just being able to permissionlessly access and send payments was revolutionary, as someone who has a lot of family in the Middle East and stuff, and is also familiar with what's going on in different parts of the world. I think one thing that was an aha moment for me, was someone was a cryptocurrency is very volatile. And I realized that some people in parts of the world, like the United States and Europe, they don't realize that everyone else's currencies are also volatile. If they think that everyone's currency is the US dollar, just is always... But they don't realize that the majority of the world lives in places that where their currency is just as volatile as cryptocurrency. (09:20):So, realizing that so many people just don't understand that, and there's so much privilege in the world that there's opportunities to build out these things, that bring equality around the world for stuff, just having stability in their currencies. So, stable coins to me, are really exciting. And that's again, one of the things that excites me actually about working at Aave is, we're going to be launching a stable coin. So, being able to be part of something like that, is pretty cool. Brian (09:44):Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. And for folks who might be based in the US, or don't have the privilege, not having to worry about their own currency not being stable, even just having to go through the pain of sending a bank wire somewhere across different countries, it's like pulling teeth. And once you send something over crypto rails, and it's near instant, you're paying near nothing, and you realize it's on this public infrastructure that you just talked about. It's like an aha moment, where it's like how could we not use this in some capacity? It's pretty incredible. (10:15):So, you hit on a couple different things there. You hinted at Lens Protocol and Aave, both of which you are the director of DevRel at. Could you talk us through a little bit about what each of those two protocols are? For folks who have been in crypto for a little while, they probably know Aave, it's a household name. Darling of the DeFi Summer days. But it's quite interesting that then Lens is also under the same house as Aave, two very different protocols. Could you walk us through a little bit about what each of those are doing, and maybe why the similar teams are building both of them? Nader (10:50):Yeah, basically I'm working a lot more closely with Lens. Just the first couple of months that I've been here to get a lot of the ideas that I personally had off the ground, as someone who's been building on Lens. And I think we're going to be doing a lot of work in Aave though, starting at the beginning of next year. A lot of work actually is happening right now in Aave, but from the DevRel perspective, we're launching some stuff. So, we're going to use DevRel power to help bring that to market. But yeah, Aave is basically a Defi protocol, and allows people to lend and borrow crypto and real world assets, without having to go through a centralized intermediary. So, that's the main value prop of Aave. And then, Lens is a Web3... Or I wouldn't even bucket in that. It's essentially a social media protocol and social media application API, that allows developers to build social graph applications. (11:41):And with Lens, you can have a lot of this backend infrastructure, like I mentioned, already there, ready for you to use to build out applications. And I think that when we think of the five billion or so people on the internet today, we might say there isn't maybe a single thread that ties everyone online together. But if you do look at the most widely used applications in the world today, you could almost probably assume that a high nineties percent of those five billion people around the world, have used a social application so far. So TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, all of these applications, are social graph applications. And they have very similar characteristics. You go to the app, and you have to create a profile. So you do that, you have a profile. You then have the opportunity to create content. You then have the opportunity to follow people. You're then given a feed of content based on who you follow, and then people that are following you, your content is put into their feed. (12:39):So, if you think about an application from that perspective, you can actually bucket a large majority of internet traffic into social graph applications. And they all literally copy, and have these exact same characteristics. So, what if we could abstract some of that away, and make it to where people could actually have those features in their application, without having to build all of that from scratch. And that's what Lens is doing. And I think that from the sheer user adoption perspective, it's the first real world use case to me, that actually appeals to people without having to teach them anything off the bat. (13:15):And that's just one thing, but making that accessible, is another story, because historically blockchain applications are very not approachable by the average person. In fact, the UX is terrible for most blockchain applications. And I don't think people understand how much friction is involved in most web three applications, for the average person I know at AWS, we would literally spend weeks and months with customers. Sometimes those customers would spend millions of dollars just to remove a couple of hundred milliseconds of latency from one of their APIs, because that latency was costing them millions of dollars in revenue, because they would drop customers or whatever. (13:56):So, when you think about a few hundred milliseconds of latency being a huge issue for a real world application. Imagine telling a new customer that they have to first download this wallet that's going to give them these private keys and these seed phrases, and they have to understand how that works. Then, they're going to have to go and find this token somewhere on the internet, and they're going to have to find out how to purchase that token. Then they're going to have to learn which network that token is on, and they're going to have to transfer that token from the place that they bought it, into that new wallet, on the right network that they bought. (14:30):Then they're going to have to pay for every transaction that they make on the network. It's crazy to think that the average person is going to be interested in this stuff. And down the road, when people start using DeFi, and stuff like that, they might understand the value that you do probably want to have that security for paying for a transaction, and understanding how all that stuff works. But for onboarding new people, it's just crazy to think that we're going to onboard millions of people this way. (14:54):So, the approach beyond having an actual use case that makes sense for the average person, also lowering the barrier to entry for that UX, is a huge thing that we're trying to solve as well. And we have some stuff rolling out next year, that's going to address that. But we've already done some stuff. Or when I say we, I'm really speaking of the Aave engineering team, and the Lens engineering team, who is just really, really incredible. They've already done a lot of stuff. I think that lowers the barrier to entry for users. Gasless transactions, meaning that the user doesn't have to pay for the transaction on the network. Low cost networks like Solana, like Polygon, others out there, make this possible for the first time where you can actually subsidize transactions the same way you can subsidize software infrastructure like AWS. (15:38):When you use an app by Twitter, you're incurring cost on their backend, but it's so small that the company eats that, and pays for that software infrastructure themselves. You don't expect to pay for a tweet. When you tweet, you don't expect to have to pay them to do that. It's like that would be crazy. So, that's where we're getting, I think, with more scalable blockchain infrastructure. And that's one of the things that they implemented into Lens. And then, the other thing is that they implemented, is a dispatcher that allows you to delegate your signing to an abstraction that allows you to do certain things on chain, but not everything. So, you don't want to be able to send money without having to sign a transaction. That would be a security concern. But posting something to a social network that's delegated without you having to sign, makes a lot of sense. Because you could always go back. (16:24):And obviously, we've never even really, that I know I've had any issues with this, but let's say that you did something wrong and then posted a post that you didn't like. We have a soft delete feature in the API, you can go and delete something. But I guess my general point is that being able to post, and comment, and stuff, you shouldn't have to sign for all of these different interactions. And that's what the delegator allows you to do. You just have the same user experience that you would in a traditional Web2 app. Brian (16:49):Yeah, totally. You touched earlier on just a couple milliseconds, a hundred milliseconds of latency, makes the difference in user attention spans. Imagine having to go find that browser extension pop up. It's going to make you not want to tweet as much, second guess some of your actions. And then I agree as well, even we've seen this from a wallet side, a lot of... I think this is definitely where the space is going. Having some permissioned system right now, if you think of permissions with wallets, pretty much all of them just, it's a connect. And then by default, you could have any permissions, but it requires manual approval. And I think we're almost training users negatively in that sense, when everything's a pop-up action, they start to not take pop-ups as seriously. (17:31):But if we could make a system where we know certain actions are safe, we don't even have to alert you about this. But then, there is a transaction that potentially you'll be exchanging funds in this transaction, you should review this manually before sending it, that's definitely moving in the right direction. So, that's really cool to see that you guys are already building on that front. (17:49):You touched a little bit too about just how these blockchain ecosystems, up until now, have been largely inaccessible. And I would argue, also largely siloed from one another. There's a lot of different ecosystems out there. You've spent time at other projects that touch multiple different blockchains, multiple different layers. You're at the graph, you're at Celestia. Now you're at Aave and Lens, which is all over the EVM ecosystem. Can you speak a little bit to how you see everything that we're building in Web3, all these different blockchains, how some of these might compose over time? What is your worldview when you're working across all these different siloed ecosystems today? Nader (18:31):The thing that really turned me off a little bit when I started really understanding the ecosystem in general, was this Maximalism that you see. And I thought it was really toxic and stuff. And I didn't really like that at all. And so, that was one of the reasons I went to work with Celestia. I really liked their approach to technology, and I like the solution that they're bringing to the table and stuff. But I also really liked the founders, I would say anti-maximalist approach to their communications and stuff like that. And I just think that being so bought into a single idea, prevents you from seeing and understanding everything else that's out there. So, I don't know... Not only think it's just toxic in general, but I also think it's very limiting for your own career and your own understanding of the whole landscape. (19:18):Because if you box yourself in, you're preventing yourself from doing any research or understanding everything else out there in the world. So, my take has always been to really try to do due diligence on all of the different technologies that are out there, and try to truly understand them, and not have any bias to the way I look at something new. And really try to get to the bottom of it. But it's hard, because there's just so many different things that are happening at a given time. And there's also so many people that are shilling their own thing, without being very honest about what are the trade-offs sometimes. So, it is challenging to understand everything that's going out there. But yeah, my take is to always try to say, "Okay, this thing is here. I'm going to do some research." And once I understand it, I want to know the trade-offs, and I want to speak honestly about those trade-offs in the future. (20:10):Because nothing is perfect, and very rarely is something legitimate actually not worth anything at all. You'll see people that try to talk about certain technologies, as if they're completely worthless. When in reality, there's a trade-off there, that's actually being made, and they're just trying to make their thing look better by talking negatively about the other thing. But I think most of the technologies... Not all, but most of the technologies that make it into the mainstream, do have a good value proposition. The question is whether or not that is the right long term trade off to make. Those are the questions that I think that we don't always know the answer to. Brian (20:47):No, couldn't agree more. And I think it times up really well with what we're doing over here at Phantom. I think by the time this episode is live, we'll be taking the first few people off our beta wait list, for a multi chain Phantom, where it's all going to be one aggregated view of switching chains, and we agree that we want to get past the maximalism front. There's a lot of really awesome work being done across the VM ecosystem, across the Solana space, and everything in between. And I think it's a really cool time for the industry to be bringing this all together. I couldn't be more excited. (21:17):So, a few more questions here for you as we wrap up. You've hit on a lot across your journey through Web2 to Web3, everything that's going on now in Web3, across Lens and Aave. If you were a new dev coming in here, let's say you have TypeScript experience, your classic what you would need for some Web3 JS work, how would you point new developers who are interested in the space and coming into the space, and wanting to potentially contribute, and end up working full-time in this industry? Nader (21:46):Yeah, I think front end developers are just very uniquely suited, but also they are in a great position, and huge opportunities lie to them without having to learn a lot of new stuff, which is really cool, and really exciting. At least for me, as someone who is for the most part, just a front end or a mobile developer. I thought that it was very approachable to get into this space, because every application still needs a front end. The only difference is that instead of sending an HTTP or GraphQL request, a traditional HTTP request, you're sending an RPC request for the most part, to transact with these different networks and stuff. And I think that's the main thing that you would have to just try to dive into a little bit, and understand. And then, you probably would be ready to start doing some interviews. (22:29):And I think if you're a good front end engineer, even with the market as it is today, there's still a very good demand for that. I think the challenge has always been for junior engineers to get their foot in the door, unfortunately. I think it is still somewhat of a challenge if you're a junior, to land that first role. But beyond that, I think that if you have some skillset on the front end, you can get started with... Most companies that are hiring will probably give you a shot. If you've done just even the slightest amount of due diligence, to understand what are these client side libraries. So, you have things like Ethers.js, you have things like Solana.js. I believe we have WalletConnect, Rainbow Wallet. And then, I think that you probably know some of the more Solana specific wallet adapters, and stuff for JavaScript. (23:14):Anyway. So experiment, figure out which ecosystem you want to be in. Look at all the different client side libraries and stuff that are there. Just build out a couple of apps over the week, literally just building out two or three apps, and throwing on your GitHub, will probably set you apart from 99% of the people out there. And yeah, it's really not rocket science, I don't think, to get hired in this industry if you're a friend and developer. So, that would be my take, is just to realize that 95% of your skills are transferable. The other 5% is just understanding these blockchain specific interactions with RPCs, and the wallet stuff as well, which is the web3 blockchain version of identity. Brian (23:50):I couldn't agree more. Building in public, building out that resume, is such a stronger signal than anything else in this space. And it can be done. It's just a couple of weeks. If you put the hard work into it, you already have the skillset. It's just about showing your work at that point. Well Nader, this has been awesome. One closing question we ask all our guests, and I'd love to hear this from you, is who is a builder that you admire in the Web3 ecosystem? Nader (24:16):Wow, that's a good question. I think that there's not just a single one, there's just really so many. I would say that if I had to point out maybe a couple of people, one of them would definitely be the team I have here, that I've met here at Lance and Ave. They're not really that active, or as active on social media, I would say. But I want to give a shout-out to Josh, who is the main backend engineer on Lens. He's just incredible. He'll come up with a solution for what is a problem that maybe has never been solved before, an idea. And then, he'll actually have implemented that in sometimes days or weeks. And just seeing that done on a consistent basis, is just really wild. There's a lot of developers from within developer DAO, that I would shout out. I think that engineers over at Celestia, like Mustafa Al-Bassam, and the rest of the folks over there, are really incredible. There's a lot of high quality people that are building right now. It's hard to say anyone without feeling like I'm leaving a bunch of people out, to be honest. Brian (25:17):That's a good sign though. Nader (25:18):But yeah, but Armani Ferrante. Armani is in this salon ecosystem. He's definitely one of my favorites as well. Brian (25:24):Oh, that's awesome. Well, I couldn't agree more. Lots of great names all through that list. No shortage of folks in this industry, who are working hard every day to push this space forward. Nader, thanks so much for coming on the show. Where can folks go to learn more about what you're up to at Lens? Nader (25:39):Yeah, I would just say, you can go to my Lens profile. It's nader.lens, on any of the lens front ends, like Lenster, on Twitter, on DaBa3. And then, I have my personal webpage set up on RWE, that's my links to my YouTube and stuff. And that's on nader.rwe.dev. Brian (25:58):Awesome. Nader Dabit, thanks for coming on the Zeitgeist. Nader (25:59):Thank you for having me. 

Season 1 | Episode 7 In this episode of Bell Curve, Jason and Dan are joined by Stani Kulechov & Robert Leshner, two of the best builders in crypto, to discuss DeFi's transformation and upcoming catalysts. We cover all of Season One's biggest topics, including CeFi's implosion, uncollateralized lending, fixed rates, duration debt, RWAs, staking yields and vertical app integration. We then cap the conversation with the question we all want to know: what will catalyze the next DeFi bull market? Trust me, it's worth the listen. - - Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (04:23) A Structural Tailwind for all of DeFi (09:44) Uncollateralized vs Collateralized Lending (17:10) DAO Capital Markets (27:07) Fixed Rates & Long Duration Loans  (36:46) How ETH's Staking Yield Impacts DeFi (43:49) Bringing Off-Chain Assets to DeFi & Censorship Resistance (52:44) GHO, Protocol Specific Stablecoins & Vertical Integration (01:00:27) Compound Gateway, Cosmos & Cross-Chain Bridges (01:04:20) DeFi Summer 2.0? (01:17:39) The Permissioned DeFi Thesis (01:22:12) Post Interview - - Follow Stani: https://twitter.com/StaniKulechov Follow Rob: https://twitter.com/rleshner Follow Dan: https://twitter.com/smyyguy Follow Jason: https://twitter.com/JasonYanowitz Follow Bell Curve: https://twitter.com/thebellcurvepod Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3R1D1D9 Subscribe on Apple: https://apple.co/3pQTfmD Subscribe on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3cpKZXH - - Disclaimer: Nothing said on Bell Curve is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Mike, Jason, and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

Brian Friel sits down with Solend founder Rooter to hear how he built the largest lending protocol on Solana.Show Notes00:41 -  Origin of PFP                    01:27 - Origin Story                     03:26 - When did they settle on Solana?  04:36 - The Journey of Solend            08:19 - Dealing with the Whale and Governance Proposals14:23 - Time Frame from whale discovery to governance proposal16:06 - What were the proposals?         19:06 - The third proposal               21:31 - Thoughts on governance and decentralization23:46 -  What would he do anything differently?25:36 - Advice to other founders on governance26:49 - Isolated pools                   31:24 - Onboarding onto DeFi             32:57 - Permissionless pools             35:39 - What's next for Solend           36:33 - A builder he admires        Full TranscriptBrian (00:06):Hey everyone and welcome to the Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the web three space forward. I'm Brian Friel, Developer Relations at Phantom. I'm super excited to introduce my guest, Rooter. Rooter is the founder of Solend, the largest decentralized lending protocol on Solana. Rooter, welcome to the show.Rooter (00:26):Hey, thank you, and thanks for having me.Brian (00:27):I think everyone on crypto Twitter will recognize you by your iconic profile picture. It looks to me like a aardvark that's shedding a single tear. Can you give a little background on what is that animal in your profile pic and how you came to rock that as your PFP?Rooter (00:41):So it's actually Pequenino, which is a fictional species from a book called Speaker for the Dead, which is part of Ender's Game series.Brian (00:52):Oh, I love it.Rooter (00:52):Basically, I was looking for a profile picture and this is one of my favorite sci-fi books. I found a frame in a comic and thought it was unique to have the character crying. Took that frame and ended up getting a custom artist piece made.Brian (01:08):That's an awesome backstory. I even seen some derivative pieces of that made now that you're a judge on the latest Solana Hackathon that's become a very iconic image in Solana lore.Rooter (01:18):Yes, it's funny.Brian (01:20):For folks who maybe aren't on crypto Twitter, would you mind giving us a little background on who you are and how you became to be founding Solend?Rooter (01:28):Sure. My background is in software engineering. Basically, I've been working as a software engineer for multiple years. Been doing smart contract development for a few years as well. Started off in the Ethereum space, did a startup in the past, which ended up getting acquired. And basically last year, I was looking at what to do next in crypto. And it was very clear that building something on a scalable version of Ethereum was the way to go because it would cost hundreds of dollars to do certain operations which would add up to thousands very quickly. Basically, at the time, Solana was one of the only alternative blockchains that provided good scalability and was actually live, since a lot of what was out there was just not live yet.Brian (02:13):And how did you settle on a decentralized lending protocol, in particular?Rooter (02:17):I was always quite fascinated by lending protocols. I read the Compound white paper when it first came out and was super excited about it when it first launched, I was a user. I always felt like there was something missing in the lending space, namely that not enough assets were supported. During DeFi Summer, there were all these different old coins launching like YAM, and PASTA coin, and whatnot. One thing I really wish I could do was short a lot of them or at least farm and hedge the risk, but there were no lending markets that wanted to list these coins because they're too risky and it imposes risk on the rest of the protocol. So I really felt isolated lending protocol was needed, which eventually came in the form. It was Arari launched Fuse. It was always like really want to see this in the market. The opportunity that Solana presented was perfect since basically, Solana was a fast-growing blockchain, and the ecosystem was rapidly coming together, and there was not yet any leader in lending. It just made sense that someone would need to lead that space, and why not be us?Brian (03:27):When did you guys settle on Solana as the chain that you were going to build onRooter (03:31):At the very start, I just want to learn about different technologies so I was looking at Optimism, which hadn't launched yet. Polygon was live, aka MATIC, and I had dabbled around with that a bit. Basically, I want to mess around with Solana a little bit, see what the developer experience was like, and it turned out to be pretty good, which I guess some people might be surprised to hear. It wasn't terrible, terrible. We built the first version of Solend prototype during the Solana Season Hackathon, and we saw from that experience how powerful it could be and that there was a lot of potential. After that learning experience, we decided to double DAOn on it.Brian (04:13):That's great. And so you guys essentially went from a Hackathon project to today, one of the largest DeFi protocols on Solana, the largest lending protocol. You guys are facilitating hundreds of millions of dollars in loans every day. Walk us through that journey. What do you attribute that success to? And how big is the Solend team? You guys started, I assume, mostly just you in a Hackathon project. What's that journey like?Rooter (04:37):So in the start for the Hackathon, it was about four of us I think, and then we became five for launching the Mainnet, stayed around that size for a couple months. More recently we started growing so we're up to nine people now, mainly engineers still. And as for what I would attribute the success to? I would say, a lot of our success was on this pivotal moment which was when we launched our liquidity mining program and our token, that's when we saw a really huge spike in deposits. Basically, I think it was timed well.Rooter (05:12):Liquidity mining is just a really great way to bootstrap liquidity, which in lending you need that liquidity for it to be useful because if there's only a couple hundred thousand dollars of liquidity in assets, a lot of users just ... It's not useful to use it. If you're doing any size, you would be moving the rates too much. If you borrowed the rates would spike due to the algorithmic nature of it. I'd say that was definitely a pivotal moment since ... When we launched it I think we had $200 million in deposits, and basically, in one or two days we jumped up to $2 billion so that was quite a wild day for us.Rooter (05:48):Before that, there was a lot of anticipation to our token launch and our liquidity mining because I think we just did a good job with our branding and our UI. To this day, I think we have the simplest UI for a lending protocol that's the most easy to use and just straightforward. And, of course, coming from myself, take it with a grain of salt but I actually really do believe that. And we spent a lot of time going back and forth with a designer who is really, really talented, and coming up with this design that we felt was improving upon existing models. We tried to design it from the ground up, especially having used these products a lot. What are the pain points and what do we want to improve on?Brian (06:28):It sounds like you guys took a lot of your learnings too from DeFi Summer, as you mentioned that being a inspiration for you guys and how Compound's COMP token really kicked off that whole scene. I definitely agree that a well-timed liquidity mining event can really spur some pretty crazy liquidity in a bull market here.Rooter (06:45):And actually, I would add another thing, which is that we've built up this reputation of doing what's right by our users. Multiple times there have been issues, whether it's Oracle issues, where wrong prices are printed, and then there are some wrongful liquidations that happened. Or, at some other occasion, the Solana network went DAOn for quite a long time, which meant that some people couldn't pay back their loans when they wanted to, and as a result, they got liquidated so we've refunded people for all of these issues. And also, there was a vulnerability disclosure from Neodyme at one point, and we worked with them to get them a million-dollar bug bounty payout. No users have ever lost money due to anything that's out of their control really on Solend, and I think that goes a long way as well.Brian (07:39):I think that's a great segue. I think a lot of folks who maybe aren't users of Solend might have heard Solend for the first time back in June, this was around when much of the crypto market was experiencing cascading liquidations. Solend was trading around 25, $26 today, at the time of this recording in July, just a month later it's back up to $40. Around this time, there was a pretty big whale on Solend who was at risk of liquidation, and Solend initiated its first three governance proposals all in rapid succession. Could you walk us through what events were going on at that time in your own words? How the situation was affecting Solend?Rooter (08:20):I'll rewind a little bit. So basically, we first noticed this whales activity back in February when they deposited around $200 million worth of Solana at a time when we had around $2 billion. Or, maybe it was closer to one billion actually. Basically, they were a very large position but it wasn't anything super crazy, and also, they weren't borrowing anything at the start. And basically, what happened is, over time they started borrowing USD against their SOL position until it got to a point where they were borrowing $100 million.Rooter (08:52):At the time, it was almost 90% of the USDC borrowers in the main pool, and their so deposits were 95% of the deposits in the main pool. Over time, they gradually became an extremely large user on our platform. When we saw this, we tried to contact them so we did a couple of things. First, we went through our own private networks. Asked investors, "Hey, is this you or do you know who this is?" Didn't get any success there. The next thing we tried was sending an on-chain message and posting on Twitter a public announcement like "Hey, is this anyone out there, please reduce your position." IBrian (09:33):I remember seeing some of your tweets saying, "We're trying to reach you about your car's extended warranty jokes."Rooter (09:39):Definitely tried to use some humor to make it go more viral so that we could have a better chance of getting in contact with them. And the issue is that they're borrowing so much that their liquidation price was $22.30 cents, and SOL was trading at $26 and had just come DAOn from $100 just a month ago or something. If it continued to go DAOn, as was a trend, what we were worried about is that they would get liquidated which would cause such a massive amount of SOL to come onto the market in a sudden way that we were really concerned about the side effects of that. Specifically, on Solend, generally, the way that liquidations work is, there are bots that will liquidate someone and sell the assets on chain in one transaction. Basically, if that transaction is not profitable they're just not going to do it. If it is, then they will.Rooter (10:37):And typically this is fine because Solend has partial liquidations of 20% so only up to 20% of your position can get liquidated. And usually, positions are relatively small so it gets handled with ease. But this would be an unprecedented size of liquidation where basically, around $120 million would become liquidable in around $21 million chunks, which if you try to market sell $20 million, especially on DEXs on Solana, you're just going to crush the market.Brian (11:09):There's no liquidity to support that.Rooter (11:11):Exactly. If you try to sell one to $2 million, there would be 5% slippage. At 20 there's just no liquidity or tank it by maybe 50%, and doing this over and over again would cause a lot of issues. A couple of things there. One, it's a super lucrative liquidation transaction that Boss will be incentivized to spam so much to try to win, right. And two, it would create a very large arbitrage opportunity on the DEXs for people to ARVE between other venues. Both these combined would cause such incentive for a lot of bot activity that we were worried that it would potentially overload the Solana network. At the time, Solana was experiencing a lot of network issues, transactions would fail.Brian (12:00):This is the pre-1.10 release.Rooter (12:04):It's gotten so much better since then, thankfully.Brian (12:06):Was there any risk at this time to say just your average depositor in Solend, "I have a couple hundred USDC, I just want to deposit in Solend for a yield? Was I at risk here based on this mega whale's actions or failure to respond?"Rooter (12:22):So usually other users are not at risk, but given the size of this user and the fact that they could move the market with their liquidation, then other users were at risk because what could potentially happen is the Solana network could go DAOn, and in the worst case it would go DAOn for a couple hours. And in the worst case, the price of SOL would also continue to drop, and so liquidations would not be able to occur, or even if they did they potentially wouldn't be able to happen fast enough which would leave bad bet on the platform. Basically, when the collateral is not worth enough to cover the loan then there's a mismatch in liabilities and that would mean basically that some users who withdraw last would not be able to withdraw. Solend has an insurance fund to repay these bad debts, but there's a chance that our insurance fund of $20 million would get depleted, and on top of that users would lose a bunch of money.Rooter (13:20):Basically, what we were looking at is, do something about it and avoid gambling for the outcome where users would lose maybe $100 million dollars and Solend's treasury gets depleted and basically spells the end for the land potentially, or do nothing and hope for the best. We're being proactive, and we looked at this situation and felt that it would make sense to do something about it. The solution that we came to was basically a very large market sale is extremely hard to do on chain but it's a lot more routine to do so OTC. So we made a governance proposal of this so then one, and basically the proposal was to liquidate these assets OTC, over the counter, to minimize flippage, get better execution, et cetera. Minimize impact to the market rather than doing so on chain. There was a lot of controversy around that.Brian (14:20):And I just want to set the stage here a little bit because I think this is a really fascinating case study for everyone who's interested in decentralized governance. I've been in the space for a couple of years now. Maybe thinking back to March 2020, but even then having governance issues that were so important. Solend being the lifeblood of the lending ecosystem on Solana, this being like you said, a potential existential question, but then also the fact that it's time sensitive. Can you just recap real quick how long you guys had from essentially finding out that this was an issue to turning out your first governance proposal?Rooter (14:56):So I think we first noticed this on June 15th, and a couple tweets trying to get in contact the 16th and around that. And then it was a couple days later that this proposal happened. And basically, we were looking at the sold charts and it's a very volatile asset, right. It actually dipped to $25, and I think in the high 25s for some time, which meant that only around a 15% drop would cause liquidations to happen, and doomsday scenario could happen. For SOL which dropped 80% in a very short period of time, a little 15% dip is not unfathomable, right.Brian (15:41):Walk us through some of the strategies here. You mentioned the first governance proposal involved taking control of the user's account in the event of a liquidation to handle this over OTC. The thinking being that OTC desk can provide better rates than the liquidity that's available latently on decentralized exchanges, there'd be less impact on users. Walk us through that proposal and then some of the subsequent proposals that followed.Rooter (16:08):That was essentially the proposal is to temporarily move the assets such that they can get liquidated over the counter and then move them back into the user's account. One common misconception is, people thought that we were taking their funds or stealing them or what whatnot, which is definitely not the case. Basically, they were just to get liquidated. And that money is still their own money it's just would be converted from SOL to USDC with the best execution that we could find. Better than what would be on Dex's. Of course, there's a lot of controversy around the method of doing that. Following that, there's a ton of controversy. And thankfully actually, the price of SOL started to recover which bought us some time. And re-evaluating the situation we thought okay, now that we have more time we can consider some other options potentially.Rooter (17:01):We made a second proposal, which rolled back the first one. We were listening to our community and the general community at large of crypto. It was definitely unpopular. Although one interesting fact actually is, it was definitely very controversial in the general sphere, but for our users that had money stuck in the platform and who were just waiting for a train to come and hit them, they really wanted us to do something about it. And we would get a lot of messages like F the haters, just do something. Don't listen to them. Just try to appease a bunch of people on Twitter and let us lose our money.Brian (17:41):And these are messages on Realms, the voting platform, is that right?Rooter (17:44):Realms and in our Discord just talking to users directly. One additional piece that I forgot to mention earlier was that, due to the utilization of the pool being so high because all of the USDC in the platform was borrowed out. That meant that people couldn't withdraw their USDC anymore because basically, the funds are not within the platformBrian (18:08):They're not available. Right.Rooter (18:10):Users were stuck in their position. They were frozen in and they couldn't exit so that was an additional thing that was exacerbating. The whale was causing real problems, it wasn't just potential.Brian (18:20):The borrow rates must've been crazy then.Rooter (18:24):I think USDC was at 60% APR and USCT went up to 200 something.Brian (18:31):Wow.Rooter (18:31):It was quite crazy. Some people were happy to collect that interest, but definitely, I think most people were sweating a little bit.Brian (18:40):Understandably so. Okay. You mentioned that the first proposal was around the OTC liquidations, in the event it came to that. Luckily, it didn't come to that, the price rebounded, then you guys initiated a second proposal which essentially gave your team more time to reevaluate, introduce the minimum one-day voting period. And then you guys also launched a third proposal which passed. Can you walk us through a little bit about what that third proposal entailed?Rooter (19:07):So the third proposal basically implemented new liquidation rules for extremely large accounts so basically, it capped the borrows of any account to $50 million. It would start off the cap at $120 million and gradually decrease it by around 500,000 per hour. Two things there. One is we don't want any single user to be a systemic risk for the platform and so there should be some sort of cap. I think this makes sense and there's pressing for it.Rooter (19:39):If you go to a bank and you ask for 100X leverage on a trade, or if you go to a crypto exchange like FDX or Binance, for a very long time you could do 100X leverage if you had say $100 dollars in your account. It's just a gamble, it's a lottery ticket or whatever. But if you go to them and you have $100 million and you tell them, "I want to get 100X leverage," they're going to tell you no, right. They're not just going to give anybody that crazy amount of leverage so you have to consider size. In the same way here, we don't want extremely large users until the platform can absorb it. As Solend grows, we can increase these caps.Rooter (20:16):And then the second part was this gradual reduction. Basically, the intent there was to spread out the liquidation over time so that we don't get a sudden $20 million sale that could cause chaos. We have them in much smaller chunks, such that the liquidations could get absorbed. If you sell a little bit on the decks it'll cause some slippage but not a crazy amount, and then it can get armed with centralized exchanges and other parties. It'll happen over the course of a couple days rather than just a couple hours or less.Brian (20:48):This third proposal passed as well, this was the latest proposal. Thankfully in hindsight, none of this actually had to come to the test. SOL rebounded, I assume the whale is no longer in imminent risk of liquidation. But I'm curious because you mentioned throughout this, one of your guiding principles is doing right by your users. You guys have done a number of different initiatives outside of that to prove that. And then you also mentioned your users were among the most vocal asking for you guys to take action here. I'm curious, where does governance come into play? What is a good time for enacting governance as a protocol founder? What decisions can you guys make as a team? What times do you actually need to bring in the community vote in situations like these?Rooter (21:32):One last thing to wrap up the whale thing. In the end, we actually were able to get in contact with them. Basically, they heard the news and someone had reached out to the Binance team ... Or, we had reached out to some people who helped us get in touch with the Binance team who then forwarded our message along to the whale. Shortly after proposing SLND3, we got in contact and talked about some mitigation strategies. In the end, they reduced their position on Solend and the price of SOL rebounded, as you mentioned. We were in the clear after that. Moving on to the question about decentralization. Basically, my thinking there is that it's better to build something worth decentralizing than to decentralize nothing. And it takes time to get to that point where you have something valuable that's worth decentralizing. My thinking basically is, if you're fully decentralized from day one it makes things extremely hard.Rooter (22:26):I don't know if you've participated in many DAOs, but if you have you would know how extremely inefficient they can be and how oftentimes there's a lot of this bystander effect where people do nothing, just stand around waiting for others to do something. I believe that there needs to be some spearheading entity that gets things done and then gets it to a point where it can be decentralized to the community and governed by the community later on. But the whole startup maze of discovery and pivoting to find product market fit and reacting to changing market environments, that's very hard to navigate as a DAO.Rooter (23:04):I don't remember who put it out at the beginning, but this idea of decentralization over time, and we're embracing that. We are working on a decentralization roadmap, which we're going to release soon. And basically, it'll outline what are the milestones on the way to decentralization? And what are the steps that we're going to take? I mean, even Bitcoin wasn't decentralized on day one, right. At the beginning, most of the hash power was owned by Satoshi and his associates and whatnot, his friends, and, it took a while for the hash power to be, as we would call it, sufficiently decentralized.Brian (23:42):Is there anything that you would do differently looking back on this whole situation?Rooter (23:46):That's a very tough question. Looking back in the situation that we were at, we were in between a rock and a hard place, and we were faced with a real-life trolley problem where one option is we gamble with our users' funds and potentially let them lose hundreds of million dollars and the life of Solend. And the other is doing something controversial that doesn't sit well with a lot of people. It was very tough and definitely hope to never have to make this decision again, but I think what we would do is we would always put our users first I think. Having users lose money is the worst thing that could happen so we would do everything we can to prevent that from happening.Brian (24:28):I commend you for your composure in responding to that situation. A lot of people like to chirp on Twitter. I think a lot of people who are working in Web 3.0 or founders of projects know what it's like to be in the arena there, and definitely don't envy your position but also, I think it's great that you guys have that principle of doing right by your users.Rooter (24:50):That was definitely tough. There was a lot of criticism directed directly at us as well. And the frustrating thing was, none of these people were users. None of them had ever touched Solend's, maybe never even touched Solana, but they were just criticizing from the sidelines. A lot of them had something to gain sort of. Maybe they were maxis or they have a platform where controversy and engagement drives metrics for them. It's an ugly reality of things.Brian (25:23):One last point on this. For any founders who are thinking about starting their own project in Web 3.0, generally, maybe listening to this podcast, is there anything you would tell them about governance as a whole or what you've learned so far in your time at Solend?Rooter (25:37):It definitely helps to be proactive and to set things up, and discuss things with people as early as possible. But at the same time, I think if you're just starting out a project, I wouldn't suggest to spin up a DAO immediately unless it's a DAO-specific project like X DAO or whatever. NOODLE's DAO or some fan club. If you're working on a startup, which happens to be crypto-powered, I would definitely suggest to figure out your place in the market first, figure out some product market fit before spending too much time decentralizing. Because if you spend all of your time and effort on the DAO piece and your startup ends up failing because it can't find product-market fit, then what's the point? That would be my advice.Brian (26:25):Well said. I want to switch gears here. I know we've been talking a lot about your guys' plans with decentralization over time. I think that's really exciting. You guys also have a number of other product launches though related to Solend. And recently, you guys announced the launch of your isolated pools product. Can you give us a quick overview of what these isolated pools are? I know STEPN has been a big example here. Can you walk us through how end user might interact with some of these pools?Rooter (26:51):An isolated pool is basically a separate pool of assets that can be cross-lent and borrowed. And this is in contrast to the main pool that we have on Solend, which was the first one that we launched with, and every time we list an asset it would go into that main pool. But the problem with that is, if you list an asset with low liquidity that is, therefore, more easily manipulatable, it opens up the entire pool to attack, not just that asset. To take one simple example. Let's say there's some token and an attacker was able to manipulate the price such that Oracle's believe that it's a million dollars a coin, then a user could deposit some of these tokens and borrow millions of dollars worth of assets against it. Millions of dollars worth of USCC, SOL, et cetera, and then just let the price fall back DAOn to say pennies and just walk away with the debt not intending to ever repay it.Rooter (27:50):Basically, yes, you need to be very careful about which assets you list. And everything in the main pool has to be of extremely high-quality, and not manipulable, and not just mintable willy-nilly. If someone could just print an infinite amount and deposit and borrow against it, that's also a big issue that we want to avoid. What isolated pools does is, we can set up these separate pools that we can then list riskier assets. And if there is an issue, it would be isolated to that pool. So we're not saying there's not going to be any issues ever, potentially at some point there would be issues, but users are opting into that risk when they enter into an isolated pool.Rooter (28:30):Some of the interesting things that we've done with these in the past is one, it's called the Turbo SOL pool so it's a pool with only SOL and USDC in it. And basically, since we have only these two really high-quality assets, we're able to increase the loan-to-value ratios for these assets. So rather than being 75%, so you can only borrow 75% of the value against your collateral, here you can borrow 95% which lets you get 10X leverage. So that's a pretty interesting use case. If you only want to leverage trade SOL versus USCC then you're better off using the Turbo SOL pool where you can get higher leverage or you can just have a lower liquidation price.Rooter (29:13):And then the other side is, listing long tail assets. One very interesting one as you mentioned was a STEPN pool. We have this pool where there's GST, which is the token that you earn from walking, and GMT, which is the STEPN governance project token. This has been an extremely popular one where it was growing a lot. The number of users in this isolate pool was our fastest growing for some time. And it opened up some interesting use cases which showcases the power of DeFi and composability. So basically, STEPN just launched their token, they don't have anything to do with lending markets or whatnot, but we are able to just launch that permissionlessly and provide a product for users to use to do a couple of things.Rooter (30:01):One is, they can hedge their entry to STEPN. Rather than paying $500 for a pair of shoes to start walking, you can borrow a bunch of GMT or GST and sell it to US dollars and then buy the shoe with that. And what that does is, if STEPN as a whole doesn't do well, for whatever reason, and the price of its shoes go DAOn, probably the price of GST and GMT is going to go DAOn as well so you end up saving that money since you didn't make such a big upfront investment so you can hedge your entry costs. And another interesting thing you can do is you can borrow GST to level up your shoes and pay it off later so it's level up now pay later. Buy now pay later.Brian (30:49):Buy now pay later but for STEPN.Rooter (30:50):Exactly.Brian (30:52):That's awesome. How have you guys seen this DeFi component fitting in with the general onboarding funnel for something like STEPN? I think STEPN's fairly unique. It brought in maybe a lot of users who weren't familiar with crypto for the first time. Do you see this as something that's more of an advanced feature today or could this potentially, in its own way, be a bit of a gateway drug to onboarding on the DeFi directly getting new users who might not have ever had a wall before to open up wallet and deposit in Solend because of the yields that they see?Rooter (31:24):It's definitely a more advanced feature. Users that use this have to be aware of their liquidation risk and they have to manage that which is pretty tricky and ideally would understand how markets work. What's an order book? Just those basics. I think a lot of people in crypto take it for granted because they've been just breathing it, eating it for breakfast every day for so long, but it does take some time to learn these concepts. The one beginner feature is you could just deposit your GST or GMT and lend it out for yield, that's pretty simple. It's good to understand the risks involved as well, but that's a much simpler product than borrowing against and managing liquidation.Rooter (32:04):And, by the way, the interest rates on GST and GMT were historically extremely high, something like 500% API which made it very exciting. And that definitely brought on a lot of people, which a lot of them were beginners to DeFi, hadn't really used crypto products much but were attracted by those very high yields, especially those that were holding GST anyway because maybe they were saving up for the next big purchase and why not earn 500% API per year?Brian (32:33):That makes a lot of sense. 500% though, I think that starts to ... Maybe some folks who aren't familiar with crypto, that starts stirring a too good to be true. For those who were around in DeFi Summer, that's small fry numbers. I think a natural extension of this concept of an isolated pool gets at something that you guys have hinted a little bit called permissionless pools. Is there anything that you guys can share about this?Rooter (32:58):As I mentioned a while ago, when I was using lending protocols and then DeFi Summer, there are a bunch of things that I wish there were lending markets for. I really wish that I could just list my own, but it's a lot of work to start a whole lending protocol, and get usage, and get network effects, and whatnot. As you mentioned, the natural next step from isolated pools is allowing anyone to list their own. And this has been something that I've wanted to get to for a very long time and so it's very cool to finally be seeing this come to fruition. Basically, quite soon, maybe by the time this pod airs, we're launching permissionless pools, which anyone can list whatever asset they want. I think it's quite a powerful concept since on day one that an asset list gets launched you can have a lending market for it so you can short anything on day one, you can leverage long anything on day one, you can use anything as collateral for a loan on day one, all powered by the community.Rooter (33:57):Going back to isolated pools, we've been launching one isolated pool about once a week, but even then we only have ... Right now we have 40 something assets and around 16 different isolated pools, but it's going to take us forever to list everything in Solana ecosystem, right, there's thousands of tokens. And at this rate of once a week, even though that's a pretty decent rate we're just never going to get to everything. I guess borrowing some lessons from Uniswap, they have permissionless listings and it made sense that they could list everything under the sun without having to spend any engineering time on it.Rooter (34:34):And in contrast to that, centralized exchanges like buying that through Coinbase, they have to spend maybe a week of engineering's time to set everything up, especially if they have legacy systems that are not designed from the start to be rapid listing machines. Coinbase, for example, as a startup, it was only for buying Bitcoin, and then they added Ethereum later on. And then now there's hundreds of assets but it took a really long time to get there, and it takes up a lot of engineering time. In this way, we're able to provide a market for everything on Solana, and we're removing ourselves as a gatekeeper and as a blocker for having these markets.Brian (35:13):That's really cool to hear. I do think that is one of the main selling points of a decentralized protocol like this is just capturing the long tail of all assets in a really efficient way. I think this dovetails pretty nicely too with what you mentioned with this hint at what your guys' plans are for decentralizing long term. I guess looking ahead, what are you most excited to build with Solend? What do you envision is the end state for how Solend fits into the broader Solana ecosystem?Rooter (35:40):One of the big parts that we're encouraging is developer usage. Solend at the end of the day is a platform. We have Sea Tokens that make it extremely easy to integrate with. Sea Tokens are just like any other SPL token that represent your deposit. And basically, we want Solend to be pretty deeply integrated into the ecosystem and be used across various different use cases. Lending is a core primitive of DeFi and it's a building block that should be used as much as possible. I really see ourselves at the base layer of Solana as a primitive that's used in many different other products.Brian (36:21):That's awesome. Well, I think you guys are definitely well on your way to being there. Rooter, this is a great discussion. Thanks for your time. One last question we ask to all our guests. Who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem?Rooter (36:34):I really admire the Orca team. Yutaro and Grace inspired me to build Solend right at the beginning because ... I knew Yutaro from his Orion days and I knew he was a very talented dev. Seeing him jump into Solana was definitely a factor for me to take a second look at it. If you haven't already had them, I would definitely recommend them.Brian (36:58):Couldn't agree more. We had Orion for I believe our third episode that we launched. They do a really great job of setting the UX bar very high in crypto, especially when it comes to DeFi projects, as you guys do as well. Well, Rooter, this is great. Thanks so much for your time. Where can people go to learn more about you and to learn more about Solend?Rooter (37:18):So for myself, you can follow me on Twitter, I'm at 0xrooter, most active there. For Solend, Solend.fi is the website and Solendprotocol on Twitter where you can find all of our updates. From there you can find all the links to everything else like our documentation and whatnot. Developer, portal, and whatnot.Brian (37:38):Perfect. Thank you, Rooter.Rooter (37:39):Thank you.

The TMBA ‘summer in Barcelona' continues with a long-standing guest visiting the city, and hanging with Dan and Ian. His name is Travis Jamison, founder of Smash Digital, and investor in numerous other companies. He's a badass entrepreneur who exited his previous business AMZ tracker, a SaaS for Amazon sellers, for ‘a life changing' amount of money, a story we told on this show. Today he talks to Dan and Ian about choosing where to live when you stop nomading, why Travis thinks agencies are highly underrated business models, ‘Defi summer', and lots more.

HopExchange is the leading bridge between Ethereum & L2s. Chris shares the story behind the project, how they designed their airdrop and why they decided to give the community so much power. Timestamps: 1:39 How Chris ended up in crypto and why Ethereum inspired him to build 3:20 The story behind the HopExchange: Auditing, DeFi Summer, and bet on L2 8:29 How they acquired their first users: timing, whitepaper & Twitter 10:07 What they've done to acquire Liquidity Providers 12:01 Methods to separate real users' signals from the aidroppers' noise 14:55 How they tracked down airdrop farmers 18:10 How do they care take of the community as there are only 4 full-time HopProtocol team members 19:54 Why they trusted their community to give them full power over the protocol for the next year 22:40 How they organized their airdrop to make it go smoothly 25:42 Why it's great to have the top DeFi founders such as Kane from Synthetix, Stani from Aave & Stefan from Gnosis on the cap table 27:35 What's the plan for the next few months for the HopExchange 29:20 Why MEV, CowSwap & NounsDAO blew his mind 33:50 Story of Rotate - their community's Sherlock Holmes - who took down Sybil attackers 35:55 Where to learn more about the Hop 36:23 His guests' ideas

Chris Osborn is the Founder and CEO of Dialect, a smart messaging protocol that powers seamless, on-chain messaging experiences, starting with wallet-to-wallet chat and dapp notifications. Joe McCann guest hosts. 00:49 - Origin Story02:06 - What is Dialect?05:59 - What are the blockers in Web 3.0?07:46 - Why Solana?11:11 - Looked into other ecosystems?13:52 - What is the process to use Dialect?22:31 - Using Solana Pay with Dialect27:22 - In-game messaging28:36 - Dialect's operations and current projects31:03 - Exciting projects in web 3.034:53 - NFTs and Messaging DISCLAIMERThe information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor. Joe (00:10):Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Solana Podcast. It is Joe McCann here again as your guest host, and today we have a very special guest, founder and CEO of Dialect, Chris Osborn.Chris (00:23):Hey Joe, it's great to be here.Joe (00:25):It's great to have you. So I'm really excited about today's episode because what you are doing at Dialect, I think, unlocks a lot of really interesting use cases in the Solana ecosystem, but first I think it might be useful for the listeners to kind of get a sense of who you are, your background and frankly, how you even got started with Dialect.Chris (00:49):So my background is actually in physics. I did my PhD in Atomic Physics at Columbia University. So this WAs like laser cooling and trapping of atoms, precision time measurements and quantum computing stuff. I learned pretty quickly that what I really loved to do is write software and build technology, so I knew after graduating that I wanted to move to the West Coast and work on some cool technology problems. I actually had an opportunity to split the difference and I worked at Rigetti Computing. I don't know if you're familiar, they're a quantum computing startup and got to work on almost every part of their stack, including a lot of software and technology.I helped lead one of the three teams that launched quantum cloud services, which was like AWS for quantum computing, and that helped me realize that I really love kind of like bridging the gap between hard tech and consumer problems and how do users interact with hard tech, and got the itch to build a startup. So actually I started this company outside of crypto and participated in YC. We were building a consumer investing product and pivoted the company actually last fall or early last fall full force induced Solana and started building Dialect.Joe (02:01):Yeah, that's great. I mean, can you maybe just in a few words, like what is Dialect?Chris (02:07):Yeah, so with Dialect what we're doing is we're building what we're calling a smart messaging protocol for DApp notifications and wallet-to-wallet chat. Those are the first two use cases that we're working on. And the best way to think about it is kind of like a decentralized inbox, a way to enable the messaging primitive between wallets. I personally like to think about kind of like hair on fire burning use cases, the things that people need today, and one of the major use cases here is giving DApps a way to connect directly with their users. And that's through the main mechanism that users identify themselves on the blockchain, which is with wallets.Joe (02:46):So cool. So, I mean, I remember meeting you many, many months ago last year and was really blown away because one of the kind of gaps that I was seeing in a lot of Web 3.0 Applications, irrespective of the underlying chain, was the ability to have like native notifications that are genuinely on chain and not using a service like Twilio or a Web 2.0 or cloud computing context. So the users kind of better understand what Dialect is and can enable, you can kind of walk through maybe some canonical use cases of Dialect?Chris (03:22):Yeah, absolutely. So the use case that got me into it right away like that first just really compelling use case is if you're using a collateralized lending protocol. You lend in token A and you borrow out token B and as prices move, if you become under collateral, the protocol or many protocols will end up liquidating your collateral on an underlying market. And in a world without messages and notifications, basically up until today, a lot of early DeFi users relied on just like a poll mechanism. Like I got to constantly come back to this product and refresh the browser and see how are my positions doing? And there've actually been some like kind of remarkable situations where when there were dramatic price movements, people could see that there was a wallet address on chain that was at risk of a very large liquidation and folks were like, "How do we get in touch with this user? How do we actually contact them and let them know that there's a problem?"And so there's no question that there's like a huge need here. Liquidations were the start, we're now working with projects across DeFi in various capacities, DAOs is another really big use case we can talk about in a little bit and NFTs. So alerts about really important situations, obviously those are kind of like that first use case, but the holy grail with messaging is user retention and engagement. So even if you get beyond emergency situations across whether it's like NFTs and more social, or whether it's DAOs and collaboration, there's just like infinite use cases for technology like this.Joe (04:58):That's really cool. I mean, I agree. It feels like almost every Web 3.0 project or protocol is going to need notifications in some capacity. I mean, I know myself I've been in those positions where I need to add more collateral to a position and I have to keep going back to it, or more recently using some of the structured product vaults that are out there where you can... if you want to say redeem some of your investment, maybe the interest that you've earned, you have to just kind of set a calendar invite.Chris (05:27):That's exactly right. That's right.Joe (05:28):Yeah. So to me that's some friction for end users, but it seems like a solvable problem and it sounds like that's what Dialect is doing. But I'm curious because today in like a Web 2.0 Kind of cloudy world, push notifications, email notifications, in-browser notifications, they just seem so commonplace to implement. So why is it that you think that this hasn't really been a thing yet in Web 3.0 ? What's been kind of the blocker and maybe then we can talk about why you chose Solana?Chris (06:01):Yeah, this is actually a really... This is a super cool problem. The blocker is the following, and obviously nothing's ever truly a strict blocker, it's really just a question of sort of like what are your priorities and what are you working on? So in Web 2.0if you're like a typical startup, you're already running some backend service that's got a database and it's got some synchronous and asynchronous processes. And if you're building in Web 2.0, there's tons of Web 2.0 tooling to support you. And so right into one of those backend services, you can sign up for Twilio, get your authentication keys, store them as environment variables and then anytime there's a specific process where you want to send a user a text message, you just fire it off. Same exact kind of Web 2.0 SaaS system exists for Apple push notifications, Android, SendGrid email, all that. Where things get interesting in Web 3.0 is typically, and especially with like the more really Web 3.0 native projects, whether that's in DeFi, NFTs, wherever, your backend is the blockchain.And there's some basic things that are different with most blockchains like Solana or Ethereum, and that's that most information is public. So you can't store sort of like secret credentials on chain and then in addition, you can't make HTTP requests to some other SaaS. So like the SaaS model breaks down when you start building in blockchain, so if you want to support these use cases for your users, you basically have to like expand your engineering footprint, spin up some Web 2.0 services that perform two processes. One is monitor the blockchain for the events that you care about and then number two is decide that you're going to send messages accordingly, whether that's like Twilio, email or push notifications. So that's part one and then part two, to answer your question about why Solana, and this comes back to my personal journey in crypto.So a friend told me about Bitcoin way back in like 2011. Around that time, I was first exposed to the proof of work concept. It's like easily top five most incredible things that I've learned in my life. I didn't start working in crypto until now, but that had a huge impact on me and I've been following along with everything that's been happening in crypto since then. So heard about Ethereum in 2016 when it... I think it launched in 2016. And what Bitcoin did with proof of work decentralization and then Ethereum did for generalizing compute on-chain and in a decentralized fashion, I discovered Solana in late 2020, I think early October, 2020. For me what Bitcoin and Ethereum did, Solana's proof of history and how it scales technology for ultra fast transaction settlement times, ultra low transaction fee costs, that to me was as impactful. So I see that in the direct lineage of technology.So, that was like late 2020, and DeFi Summer was in full force. I was starting to use more and more technology like more and more Web 3.0 native apps. Over the course of that year I mentioned I was working on a separate project, I saw the Solana ecosystem just absolutely explode. It was like a literal Cambrian explosion. So by the time it was like late summer of 2021, I was taking a hard look at what I was currently working on and then I was looking at Solana and saying every extra week that I'm not working on solana is just a huge missed opportunity. And pulled the trigger and moved full force into Solana. Solana's transaction costs and speed opened up an enormous new design space that is really not feasible if you want to build a truly on-chain messaging system on some other blockchains.So if you're looking at fractions of a tenth of a penny in terms of the transaction costs and then subsecond, you know 400 millisecond block times, that enables a very large new design space. So what I saw at the time was this opportunity to build a whole new SaaS layers. So with Dialect we're building developer tooling, we want to provide this end user experience for developers to build into their own DApps. And when you have any orders of magnitude improvement in performance, it just opens up a very large new space to build in, so to me it was a no brainer. There was no question in my mind. So I've been a blockchain enthusiast for over 10 years, but Solana was that threshold. That was sort of that Rubicon where I just knew this is this, it's now time to build.Joe (10:22):Yeah. I mean, I feel like in other ecosystems, something like this... I don't want to say it's not possible, it just seems like it's impractical. And I think Solana's design where it has this incredibly cheap transaction fee and speed is perfectly suited for something like Dialect and on-chain messaging, if you will. But have you dug into say other chains like maybe something in the Cosmos Ecosystem or even just Ethereum? And did you evaluate whether or not this could be done or was it just kind of like at the baseline look, Ethereum is like pretty expensive for transaction and relatively slow block times, this is just going to work for say push notifications or wallet-to-wallet messaging?Chris (11:12):Yeah, so that's a great question. I would say the following: there are some wallet-to-wallet chat and communication tools on Ethereum and with many of them, what you do is you authenticate with your wallet, but the messages may be stored off-chain somewhere else. And that's not obviously a total deal breaker. In general, I think the authentication problem... I know it's not specific to messaging, but it obviously takes really like a front seat in messaging of who's sending these messages, and the general problem of authenticating with your wallet is just a fun design space. So we're personally really excited to see messaging come online on some other blockchains. If you really want to run a fully on-chain experience where the message source of truth is on-chain, Solana really has several orders of magnitude on a lot of these competing chains.Not that that's necessarily the future that exists long term, it may actually make sense for there to be more of a data centric L1 that stores these messages. And so the choice for us coming full circle on this question is Solana presented an opportunity for us to build relatively small architectural footprint. That means let's just keep as much on Solana as possible. We're decentralized first, we're not storing any messages in say fire base or any other Web2 services, and really provide that great experience, and it's really just a question now of where go.Messaging between wallet is such an important and compelling use case, and I think we're seeing a lot more projects come online now that this problem's inevitably going to be solved in a cross chain manner. We are excited about that future, but we're a hundred percent focused on Solana for now. We also say, I didn't necessarily explicitly say this earlier, but Solana's proof of history concept and the way that it works, some of the first podcasts I listened to about that in summer and fall of 2020, just really blew my mind. So another big piece of it is go where there's just exciting technology, where the developers are extremely talented and everybody's really enthusiastic. For us, there's just a no brainer, we a blast on Solana.Joe (13:15):I hear that very, very often these days, there's been quite a bit of interest from developers; in a lot of cases, developers who have never written an Ethereum app or any sort of other Web 3.0 app or just diving into Solana and loving it. So speaking of developers, as a developer, how do I use Dialect? Can you kind of walk us through the scenario? Is there an SDK? Is there a token I need to have? What is the kind of process if I'm a protocol or a project today that wants or needs on-chain messaging or notifications for my protocol or project? How do I get started?Chris (13:54):Let me answer in two parts. Number one is what you do today. Our messaging protocol is live and audited on the Solana main net, and we have open sourced our protocol and Web 3.0 client we build with Anchor. I really love anchor, it's one of our favorite toolkits we've worked with. So you can import that Web 3.0 client directly into your web app or some other process, some other service that you're running and you can get started sending messages right away. As I mentioned, even for DApp notifications, the primitive is wallet-to-wallet messaging. So in the same way that you might receive an email from a business, some kind of notification they're sending from an email address that they manages the business, the same thing goes here; you manage a key pair that you do your messaging with. So you can import our protocol and just start sending and receiving messages.The main way that most projects interact with our tooling is two-part though, two layers on top of that core protocol. Number one is if you're a DApp and you need to send a notification to a user or a message saying that they're at risk of liquidation, let's come back to this liquidation example. You need to be monitoring the blockchain to detect that there's this event where you then programmatically send the messages. The same thing goes historically with Twilio or SendGrid, you incorporate this code into your services. So like we talked about earlier, you need to be running these off-chain services that help determine that events are happening and to write messages. And we offer open source tooling around this, it's called our monitor framework and our monitoring service, which is our opinionated way about how to host that. And you can then basically spin this up yourself, or you can host with us and you use that to write the very minimal code that's specific to your protocol.So let's say you have some way to query for the users or the wallets obligations, which is a term that lending protocols use, and you can get your collateral health or your risk of liquidation directly from that data. Our monitoring service allows you to fetch that data, basically write the code that's specific to your protocol and then that gets piped into kind of like a reactive framework that we use to determine whether or not to send messages. So this is monitoring tooling that's specifically custom built for figuring out to send a message and it can work very flexibly with other kinds of tooling. Maybe it's like you've got a Kafka messaging queue, or some other kinds of... Some projects actually have fairly sophisticated Web 2.0 infrastructure, but they're still interested in working with us because we handle the hard problem to just making sure at most one and just at least one message get fired off to a user.The second half is how do you surface these messages to users? So today what we're solving, what we're live with are what we're calling in-app notifications. So think about your favorite Web 2.0 product; you sign in, and maybe somewhere in the nav bar you see a little notification bell and it's a button and you can click to see that there are messages or something you need to know about from that product. Today, we offer basically like a single React component. We're prioritizing React, most projects, web apps are built in React, where you can drop that single component into the nav bar of your DApp and right out of the box if a user clicks that notification, they have the opportunity to fully onboard to the notification experience all within that single component. So it's like a model that pops up that allows you to say yes, I'd like to enable notifications for this app.And then once you've done that, you can kind of see what are you going to get notifications around. So it might be warnings about pending liquidations, it might be liquidations themselves, it might be actually more receipt style messages. So it might be an order filled if you're using a DEX where orders fill asynchronously, it can be things around DAO collaborations. So one of the major use cases that DAOs we've been speaking to have been interested in is engagement and retention on voting. So you might receive notifications from a DAO telling you that you have six hours left to vote on a proposal, or that there's a new proposal, or that maybe you're near a quorum on the voting threshold needed to pass or reject a proposal. So there's all these different use cases and really you get that right out of the box directly in your nav bar with this single React component. So that's in-app notifications.What's coming soon and coming back to this question of just the broader messaging thesis, we're launching support soon for email, Telegram, possibly text message, other kinds of Web 2.0 means because the reality is even if the thesis and the vision is fully on-chain messaging, we live in a world where many users rely on and really appreciate getting messages via Web 2.0. So email's a no-brainer, and a lot of projects have asked us to support that so that's coming online very soon. And then Telegram is a little more of like a Web 3.0 native messaging solution that's still off-chain, and a lot of projects have asked us for support on that. So you can think of the Dialect standard as both the on-chain messaging standard, as well as a suite of really out of the box tooling to allow DApps to reach their users however they want.Joe (19:13):What's really interesting about how you're thinking about building out your company and the protocol and kind of the suite of products is that it reminds me of kind of like early days of Twilio. So I wrote a blog post many years ago, probably 10 years ago now about how over-the-top messaging was really kind of this new platform play. We've seen through the myriad messaging apps and then kind of the power of iMessage on Apple and the blue bubble versus the green bubble. I think there's now a regulation coming out of the EU that all these messaging apps have to inter-op with each other. But that took many, many years and I think Twilio really captured a lot of the developer mind share around creating these kind of suites of messaging products and it started with SMS. And so you mentioned something like Telegram, which I think everybody in crypto lives and dies in Telegram. I can barely keep up with myself.Chris (20:17):That's right.Joe (20:17):I've written some Telegram bots and they're pretty easy if you have a fundamental understanding of how webhooks work. Is that something that Dialects will enable? Is that like maybe some arbitrary webhook could fire? Or is it something that needs to be actually he baked into the on-chain program itself?Chris (20:34):Yeah, so it's not actually for support. We want to keep the part on-chain as light and simple as possible and so you can think of these web two channels such as Telegram as really just parallel rails. So you have the detection of an event that a user wants to hear about and that's monitoring data on-chain, and then you have various channels which may purely be in one user's case, "Oh, I just want to get an email, or I just want to get a Telegram message from a bot that's managed by the project." The developer experience around Twilio and Telegram and whatnot are excellent, but what Dialect provides here, if a DApp is interested in reaching their users by these means is you just get it all out of the box right away. You write a little snippet of code that fetches the data that determines if a message needs to be sent, and then you say how you want each message to look and that's really all you have to think about.The user will choose how they want to be gotten in touch with directly through the front end tooling that we provide. I think it was actually you, Joe, who mentioned this to us, that one of the key metrics is time to success. Crypto is moving at just an absolute lightning pace and while every project that we've talked to really wants this tooling, it's never quite the first priority that they have. So what we're trying to do is really make that as simple as possible for these projects to integrate us.Joe (21:53):So let's talk about some of the categories that exist, not just broadly in Web 3.0, but I would argue is probably more suited towards Solana, particularly the payment space. So Solana Pay has launched, there's lot of people building a lot of really interesting stuff with Solana Pay from point of sale solutions to web apps and mobile apps, et cetera. Can you kind of walk me through an example of how say someone that wants to build something with Solana Pay would utilize Dialect. Chris (22:26):Yeah, this is actually a really fun topic. Ever since Solana Pay got launched, the team and I have just been super excited about the messaging use cases there. This is also a good template for talking about our smart messaging thesis, so I'm going to segue from Solana Pay into a broader discussion here, but I would start by saying the following: Solana Pay is a standard for being able to perform transactions, being able to perform transfers between wallets on-chain and there is a very compelling messaging use case here. If you think about some of the standards in Web 2.0 , whether it's Apple Pay for transferring, or Venmo or Square Cash, that kind of dynamic experience of being able to message between users and actually take action on the message. One of our key insights with Dialect is this smart messaging standard we're building toward, and you can think of that kind of like an interactive link preview.In every DApp that you use where you connect your wallet, you have signing privileges everywhere. And so where we're building and this... A few minutes ago I said, "Here's where Dialect is today and the question is where we're going." In this smart messaging future, we're allowing users to send basically interactive link previews and you can think of a transfer request as one of the simplest use cases there. So for example, if you want to send a transfer request by a Dialect message to one of your friends directly at their wallet address, you can send that and then they can take action right in the message, whether that's scanning a QR code that's rendered for them, or it's clicking a send payment message. Coming back to some of the use cases we talked a little while ago about such as liquidation, warnings or DAO proposals and voting prompts, the holy grail in user retention and engagement is being able to reach them and have them be able to take action right where you're messaging with them.In Web 2.0 beyond these app specific use cases, whether it's a Venmo transfer request or similar, most of the time if you get an email, there's a link in the email and you have to click that and go out to another app. And maybe you're not logged in on your phone so you say, "Okay, in five hours when I'm back at my computer I'll take care of this." Or similar with a text message. What's really unique about messaging in Web 3.0 is that we can build a standard where you can take action right in the message. So whether it's Solana Pay, whether it's a vote yes or a vote no on a proposal, or it's a quick deposit to top up your collateral to avoid liquidation, any of those things with Dialect and our smart messaging standard, what we're building toward is that kind of Web 3.0 native future. So the last thing I would say about this is, yes, it's true that messaging and notifications are this really critical missing piece of Web 3.0 and it's just a really known hair on fire problem. When we got started on Dialect, the question we asked ourselves is not just how we fill in that missing piece, but also how we take Web 3.0to a place that Web 2.0 can't as easily go. And this is because our thesis is Web 3.0 is going to reach mass adoption because of exciting and really compelling delightful new use cases that products are going to start to come online, whether they take advantage of universal authentication like we're talking about now, whether they take advantage of composability of sort of the global shared state of all the data existing on a single blockchain, those are the use cases that are going to make it really compelling for the first billion users to onboard to Web 3.0. This is our thesis with smart messaging and Solana Pay is a really key and interesting part of that picture.Joe (26:18):I'll be honest, that is fascinating because one of the cool things about what you're mentioning is that push notifications or in-app notifications become actionable. You can actually do something right there-Chris (26:33):That's right.Joe (26:34):... versus it being this sort of delayed or async process. And so the use cases really open up pretty dramatically because of the fact that these messages are now interactive and you can do things with them.Chris (26:50):That's right.Joe (26:50):And have you guys thought through maybe where this could potentially work in like the context of a video game or even like the metaverse? There's a lot of Web 3.0 games/metaverse type environments being created and I'm curious if sort of in-game messaging makes sense or if it's something that is slightly different?Chris (27:18):Yeah, in-game messaging I think is a fantastic use case, and we've spent a little less time talking to gaming projects. I think just because that's a little early on, as we have say, talking to DeFi, NFT, DAO projects. But one of the things I'm most excited about is sort of the universality of NFTs as assets and all of the infrastructure that's being built around the things that you achieve and the assets that you acquire in-game end up having a life and a value beyond that game. It's really compelling to us that there be interactive sort of like smart message experiences around that content, at the very least. So I think gaming is an incredibly exciting in use case.Joe (28:05):Awesome. Yeah, I could see a lot of really cool integrations being utilized there and they just kind of don't exist today. I mean, frankly, there aren't a lot of Web 3.0 games period, but I know a lot of them are coming online later this year. What about like the traction of the company and folks that you're working with today? I know since you pivoted Dialect into this smart messaging protocol business things have really started to heat up. Can you talk about maybe how many people you're kind of signing up or any projects that are currently utilizing your product today?Chris (28:38):Yeah, that's right. We're talking to a few dozen projects right now across a lot of the verticals that I mentioned earlier. We're going live with a handful of our first projects that we've publicly announced so far. So that includes Squads and meaning on the DAO tooling side, Jet Protocol on the lending side, Bridgesplit on the NFT and NFT fractionalization space. Oh, on protocol Friktion is another project, you mentioned structured products earlier and it's been a real joy working with them. One of the things that we believe is it's best to like dog food your own tooling to make it better. So we've just straight up been rolling our sleeves up to help build out with them, and that helps us get better and better at our developer tooling.Then there's just this other wave, as I mentioned, a few dozen other projects that we can't talk about quite yet, but are extremely excited to support. And to support all these projects, we've also been growing the team pretty quickly as well. So there's a lot going on right now and as we talked about earlier, it's an incredibly compelling use case. This technology has to exist, at the very least receiving an email or a text message or a Telegram message. But where things really catch and where we really have a great time with our conversations is around this smart messaging future that we're building out, and that's when I think folks get really excited about the opportunity.Joe (30:07):Yeah. I mean, I completely agree. It's really hard to imagine a scenario where an app isn't going to need some form of messaging or notifications. And given the direction and the future of the company and where you guys want to take the product and protocol, it seems inevitable that folks are going to be adopting this. So maybe talk a little bit about how you're envisioning the future. You know, you have a very specific view into what you're doing with Dialect, but by engaging with all these different projects and protocols, you can get like an interesting view into what things are happening, what things are coming out soon, and maybe where you see things heading. The space is evolving and changing so rapidly and quickly that it's hard to predict anything, but what are some things that you kind of see in the future not necessarily just for Dialect, but also you Web 3.0 in general and how maybe Dialect plays a role in that?Chris (31:05):Yeah. I think if there were a single theme and I'm not alone in saying this, it's just really what got me into crypto in the first place and it's incredible to see it beginning to happen. I would say the thesis here is composability, so any blockchain that really makes global shared state a possibility. I think it might have been Chris Dixon who said composability is like compounding interest, it just causes this exponential runaway in technology. And the things I'm most excited about and we are most excited about at Dialect is that composability. So whether it's being able to exchange information and perform financial actions between DeFi protocols or it's the financialization that's going into some gaming tools that are coming online, like you said, that rely on some DeFi infrastructure like... To me, this is why it's going to be the sort of killer consumer experiences that come of composability and global shared state that are really going to make for the next big wave in Web 3.0.Chris (32:09):And the way we're interested in that in our own small way with Dialect, and I didn't mention this earlier, is one of our visions here with smart messaging is creating a kind of decentralized inbox. So as we mentioned, our tooling today supports these on chain messages delivered directly to any given DApp where the user enables and then can consume those messages in the DApp itself. But those messages can be consumed by anyone and so there's this other half of the problem that we're working on that's coming online soon, where for example, a mobile wallet could have an entire inbox and messaging section. And now you're talking about no matter which DApps you've enabled, you're receiving a true iOS or Android push notification directly to that mobile messaging experience that you have there, and that's just yet another example of composability. And so, like I said, I'm not alone in being incredibly excited about this but it really is, I think, the kind of compounding developer experience that's just going to create a whole new set of really exciting consumer... Like a new kind of internet consumer experience.Joe (33:18):That's awesome and I agree. I think one of the areas that is no short of discussion in Web 3.0 is NFTs. I've talked about this on some Twitter spaces and other podcasts where right now we're just kind of in the infancy of what NFTs can unlock. You know, there's obviously the art aspect of it, there's in video game assets, et cetera, et cetera. But one of the things that I am interested to hear your take on, and maybe how this correlates to Dialect is NFT is in a person's wallet, it's on chain, but the person interacting with the wallet is a customer, a user, and I think a lot of companies want to be able to engage with their customers and users more directly. So is there a scenario where I have an NFT in my wallet and depending on the NFT mentor or something, maybe it's a brand, maybe it's a company, maybe it's an artist, maybe it's a musician, has a way to either via the NFT directly or utilizing Dialect, be able to kind of communicate with me directly?Joe (34:31):An example I always give is imagine Starbucks wants to airdrop, I don't know, some seasonal loyalty program thing, right? Christmas, Easter, or whatever, spring break, you name it, and it's for people that have this NFT in their wallet and they want to airdrop them something or be able to communicate with them. Is this something that Dialect would unlock or do you think this is something that's more kind of NFT specific?Chris (34:55):To be honest, I thought you'd never ask about this. This is this third part of smart messaging that we are just beyond excited about. It touches on a few different things, but maybe I'll just say briefly that another key aspect of Web 2.0 messaging that I think to many of us feels very broken is this question of sort of like cold inbound and marketing and spam. With Web 3.0's inherent financialization, there is this very natural situation where you can basically tokenize messaging and create markets around how different entities communicate with each other. And on the two extremes there, or maybe let's talk about three, two to three points on the spectrum here. If you Joe and I just want to message with each other, there's sort of mutual opt-in in the exchange of a token and we can just message with each other.Similarly, if there's a business that I really love and I want to opt-in let's say, like you mentioned, I think you said Starbucks, I'll opt into that and there may be some implicit under the hood kind of exchange of a token that allows for that messaging. There's also scenarios where businesses want to get in touch with individuals that they think are high value, and that's a cold inbound scenario. In that scenario, a business might need to actually buy one of these tokens of yours on an exchange in order to engage with you.By financializing that component of cold inbound, I think one, it creates a much more harmonious kind of like cold messaging experience in Web 3.0 that in many ways is a bit much in Web 2.0, but in the mutual opt-in scenario or the messaging is effectively like vanishingly small cost or effectively free. And powering all of this, kind of coming back to your point about NFTs, is the NFT primitive. So this is a technology in an architecture we're exploring right now and it's very likely that NFTs will serve that use case. It's a kind of technology in a use case that we're just like beyond excited about.Joe (36:59):Fascinating conversation today with you, Chris. I really appreciate it. The future's bright for Dialect, the use cases that you've outlined are kind of no brainers, but what I'm really excited about is what we unlock in a Web 3.0 native context for smart messaging. I want to thank you today for joining the Solana Podcast. How can people actually get in contact with you? Are you on Telegram or Twitter? If they want to contact Dialect and get in touch, what's the best way of doing that?Chris (37:26):Yeah, the best way to get in touch with us is on Twitter and our Twitter handle is @saydialect, that's S-A-Y D-I-A-L-E-C-T. We love engaging with the community. Developer feedback, we live and die off of that, and so if you have complaints about our technology, have feature requests, any of that, send it our way. We're also on Discord. We have a Discord community, you can join that from our bio in Twitter. And then the last thing I would say is we're hiring, and so if this technology is interesting to you, we would love, love, love to work with you.Joe (38:02):Well, you heard it here first folks. Chris Osborn, computer scientist in the quantum physics space turned smart messaging protocol engineer and architect. Chris, thanks so much for joining the Solana Podcast. Looking forward to chatting with you again soon. See ya.Chris (38:18):Thank you very much, Joe. It was my pleasure.

In this episode, I have the pleasure of speaking with Kain Warwick, Co-Founder and Council Member of Synthetix, Synthetix is a new financial primitive that enables the creation of synthetic assets in the form of derivatives which give you real-world asset exposure on the blockchain. Synthetix is an imperative building block within the decentralized finance ecosystem.We cover the power of narratives in crypto, in other words, the importance of conveying complex topics to collegial builders and investors. We discuss the opportunities that still exist around the infrastructure of fiat to crypto on-ramps. Kain talks about how the last 2 years of crypto adoption are different from the previous 10, in that there has been a more positive narrative adoption. We cover how DeFi, decentralized finance took off during May of 2020 leading into “DeFi Summer.” We dive deep into governance, the importance and difficulties of building out the proper governance rails to shepherd large remote groups of people with a common goal and vision. Kain sets his sights on the next megatrends that can unlock more value which sits at the crosshairs of DeFi and NFTs. There is no shortage of gems in this conversation.   I hope you enjoy the episode, you can subscribe to Web3 Frontier where we release a Podcast every week.Contact Info:Igor YuzoTwitter @igoryuzoKain WarwickTwitter @kaiynne

On the very first episode of Rehash, we're chatting with YouTuber and DeFi educator Kris Kay (aka Defi Donut). We start off the episode by getting to know Kris, his background, and how he got into crypto. Kris then answers some of the beginner crypto questions like, “what is the difference between crypto and web3?” and “what is DeFi?”Then, we get into some more complex topics including crypto culture, DeFi trends, proof of work vs. proof of stake, and important things you need to know about the upcoming Ethereum merge. Finally, Kris looks to the future and shares what he's most excited about next for DeFi, and gives us some tips on how to get started in crypto. To continue this conversation and stay up to date on all things Rehash, you can follow Diana on Twitter @ddwchen and Rehash @rehashweb3. You can follow our guest, Kris, @thekriskay. ⌛ TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 Intro0:45 Kris's Background3:32 Crypto vs. web36:04 What is DeFi?7:37 How DeFi can improve the ways we interact with money11:16 Trends in defi14:28 Basics of DeFi15:34 Defi culture vs. NFT culture18:10 Proof of work vs. proof of stake22:55 Liquid staking 24:12 Important things to know about the ethereum merge29:01 The future of DeFi30:42 Regulation of DeFi31:54 How to get onboarded to DeFi?34:17 Follow Kris! DISCLAIMER: The information in this video is the opinion of the speaker(s) only and is for informational purposes only. You should not construe it as investment advice, tax advice, or legal advice, and it does not represent any entity's opinion but those of the speaker(s). For investment or legal advice, please seek a duly licensed professional.

Jacky (TaipeiCity.eth) is the cofounder of Shibuya. Shibuya is NFT artist PplPlsr's project bringing long-form animation to Web3. At the age of 30, Jacky quit his job as a software engineer at Instagram. During Covid, Jacky spent a year in Taiwan. It was Taiwan where he experienced DeFi Summer and began creating animated NFTs of his oil paintings. Jacky is also the host of the Chinese-language podcast, Left-Side Escalator.Learn more about Jacky and Shibuya:Jacky's Twitter: @taipeicity_ethJacky's Instagram: @jackywangadventuresJacky's ArtJacky's WritingsJacky's Podcast: Left Side EscalatorShibuya: https://www.shibuya.xyz/aboutIn the episode we discuss:How Jacky became a self-taught developerJacky's time in Taiwan during DeFi SummerWhy Jacky left InstagramJacky's journey into art and how he started an art exhibition featuring his artHow Jacky started his podcast, Left Side Escalator, and monetizing his podcastWhat is Shibuya and how he cofounded the project with PplPlsrIf you liked this episode, you can find more episodes at wld.show!

The summer of 2021 was called DeFi Summer, and for good reason. We saw the Total Value Locked (TVL) during this time skyrocket as new platforms emerged. But these DeFi platforms had a few downsides. But the advent of DeFi 2.0 and the rise of asset-backed stabletokens aims to change this.Links:Podcast - https://www.blockchainandbeyond.co.uk/Twitter - https://twitter.com/BCBeyondPodcast and https://twitter.com/FarzanAkhtar1Substack - https://substack.com/profile/33433115-farzan-aYoutube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpxhLjdOdi5oiOG2nRIgsTQ/featuredInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/blockchainandbeyondpodcast/Tiktok - https://www.tiktok.com/@blockchainandbeyond2021 

NFTYQ sits down w/ 0xCaps and NFTX to discuss, NFT Lending, Why DeFi is Important for NFTs, the Bored Ape Coin Flash Loan, and much more! 0:00 Start 0:05 Intro 1:33 $APE Coin Swap Controversy 7:12 0xCaps Background 12:19 Risk in Decentralized Finance 13:21 #DeFi Summer and DeFi Talk 21:07 Distribution during NFT Sales 22:49 Why is DeFi Important for NFTs? 25:11 NFTX Origin Story 28:57 How does Lending on NFTX Work? 32:45 How do you make NFTX Accessible to New Users? 35:32 How much can you make when lending NFTs? 37:32 FloorDAO Discussion  47:07 $NFTX Token

We're thrilled to introduce Inner Sphere, Republic's brand new podcast hosted by Graham Friedman and Bryan Myint, crypto experts, and Republic Crypto Directors.Graham and Bryan share their goals with the podcast and an overview of the topics they'll be covering. In today's episode, Graham and Bryan also discuss how the different cycles in the crypto industry work, the rise of sectors, and which crypto ecosystems you should be watching in 2022. Tune in now to learn more! Key points discussed- Introducing Inner Sphere (00:00)- How Republic crypto came to be (03:08)- How blockchain technology works (06:50)- Why the DeFi Summer of 2020 changed the crypto game (10:06)- Predictions on the NFT market for 2022 (13:51)- The one crypto ecosystem to watch in 2022 (22:28) Additional resourcesTo keep in the loop for the latest developments in crowdfund investing, make sure to follow this podcast and listen in every week.Find vetted investment opportunities in NFTs, virtual real estate, metaverse platforms, gaming, and infrastructure at https://everyrealm.com/Ready to start investing in your future? Then head over to www.republic.co and find a startup you're passionate about.Legal Disclaimer: This podcast is provided for educational purposes only by OpenDeal Inc. dba Republic and Republic Core LLC (collectively "Republic"). Nothing discussed should be construed as legal tax, accounting or investment advice. The views of the presenters may not be the views of Republic and its affiliates. Always consult with trusted professional advisers before making investments. Private investments are inherently illiquid and may result in total loss. No broker-dealer and funding portal or investment advisor participated in the creation or distribution of this content. All rights reserved.

In this episode, Dan Albert (Executive Director), Lily Liu (President) and Mable Jiang (Board Member) discuss the role of the Solana Foundation in advancing the Solana protocol and ecosystem with support and initiatives around the world. Austin Federa (Head of Communications, Solana Labs) guest hosts. 0:43 - Intros / Roles3:13 - The appeal of working at the foundation level07:48 - Establishing scope for the foundation12:42 - What's working in the ecosystem?20:01 - From the ecosystem to the foundation21:21 - Growing Solana in new markets33:50 - Shared Ownership of the network36:21 - Predictions for 2022 in crypto and web 3.0DISCLAIMERThe information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor. Austin Federa (00:10):Welcome to the Solana podcast. I'm Austin Federa filling in as guest host today. We spend a lot of time on the show talking to founders and builders in the space, people building on the Solana blockchain or otherwise involved in the Solana ecosystem. But today we're actually going to be talking about a different component, which is the Solana Foundation. Today with us, we have Dan who's the executive director of the Solana Foundation. We have Lily, who's the president of the Solana Foundation and Mabel, who's one of the board members of the Solana Foundation. Welcome to the Solana podcast, guys.Lily (00:39):Thanks for having us.Dan (00:40):Great to be here.Mabel (00:41):Thank you.Austin Federa (00:42):All right, Dan, let's start out with you. Tell me a little bit about what the Solana Foundation's role is in the ecosystem.Dan (00:49):Sure. The foundation is really here to help foster the growth of the Solana network and really the Solana ecosystem kind of in broad strokes at the highest level, what can we do to make sure that the Solana network continues to grow in the most kind of sustainable and decentralized manner as possible? And how can we provide resources and help the community grow to onboard the next or the first billion users to the Solana ecosystem and crypto in general?Austin Federa (01:24):Lily, what attracted you to the Solana Foundation? And how did you get involved in it?Lily (01:30):Well, I've been in the crypto ecosystem for a little bit and I must confess that in 2018, 2019, I actually spent a good bit of time being a Bitcoin maxi. And then I even was part of Little Bitcoin Book and which is not to say, sometimes I feel like people in crypto are a little bit maybe too tribal, which is not to say I don't love Bitcoin. I still consider Bitcoin to be king. But when I took a little bit of time out of crypto, when I came back to crypto, I started just using a lot of the apps that had sort of emerged out of DeFi Summer and I was totally floored by using Raydium in April. I really could not stop talking about it for just about a month because it was very squarely Web 3.0 but it felt like Web 2.0 and it was just so obvious to me at that moment that this was going to be how the next billion people, if we were going to get a billion people into crypto, anytime soon it was going to be on Solana.Solana to me is just such a unique combination of being technically so innovative but at the same time, really understanding that to bring people into the ecosystem, it has to be a good experience. And sometimes for your end user, it really just is as simple as saying, "It's fast and cheap." And that's why ethernet is just better than 56K modems. And sometimes it just has to be that simple to the end user if you're going to appeal to a billion people.Austin Federa (02:48):Yeah, I completely agree with you. There's been so many of those moments I've sort of heard over the last year of people just trying something on Solana and having this experience of, oh, it just works. It's fast. It feels like a Web 2.0 application but it's delivered in a fully decentralized way. Just based on that, what was the decision in your mind to, tons of people have that experience, they go build something, they go work for a company building in the space in terms of a service provider company. What was the sort of appeal of something that's more at the foundation level?Lily (03:19):To me, I think that, I come from a background where I spent a lot of time, I originally started working in more traditional industries. I worked in McKinsey, I worked at KKR and I kind of fell into Bitcoin back in 2013, 2014, which at the time was not a very obvious thing to do. And so for me, I think one of the things that I maybe add to the ecosystem is helping run effective organizations and thinking about sort of how to scale a commercial kind of go to market strategy and having been in the ecosystem for a little bit. And so for me, what's always attracted to me to crypto and Web 3.0, is these kind of new ultimately end user experiences that you enable for, not just those of us who've been kind of nerding out over technical sort of minutia left and right but really making that accessible and available.Lily (04:17):Some of the things that I'm really excited about facilitating through the foundation is kind of new markets growth outside of the US, outside of Europe, outside of the parts of East Asia that are already very familiar with cryptocurrency. And to me, it's so clear that if these types of applications, call it DeFi or sort of more metaverse or social or NFTs are going to take hold, then it's most likely going to start on Solana first. And so just being a part of that and sort of making that more accessible to a broader rate of people is really what's exciting to me.Austin Federa (04:51):And Mabel, you tell us a little bit about your path to becoming a board member at the Solana Foundation.Mabel (04:57):I think among all the people here, I probably joined the board the earliest. I joined when the board started, the foundation started. That kind of history just goes back to when I think before the token launch of Solana happened to that Anatoly and Raj, they were in China and in East Asia. And then that was even before my time joining Multicoin. I met them, obviously at that point it was 2019 and then it wasn't really easy to raise fund for sure. But then we kind of just happened to hang out a lot in Shanghai, in Seoul. I think another places like Beijing and whatever. And then we spent a bunch of time over those three weeks and then talked about, oh, how do I think about or how do we usually think about go to market strategies for public chains? And then how do people really differentiate one smart contract from the other?When they go back to San Francisco, they ask, "Can you maybe write us some sort of expansion or kind of go to market plan for Solana in East Asia?" And I did that. That was right around the time when they're forming a board for the foundation. And then, that's also around the time when I joined Multicoin. They invited, it's like since you're part of the ecosystem and then you are pretty unique kind of position compared to some of the other board members, are you interested to kind of help Solana Foundation or raising the Solana awareness in a global sense? I was like, oh, that was really interesting in a differentiated way to contribute to the ecosystem so I said, yes.Since then, that was start of 2020. Since then over now, I've been doing quite a bit of things, always related to those lines, raising the awareness for Solana in China specifically because that's where I'm sitting. And also in some other places in Asia and also try to just kind of talk to different projects in multiple different ecosystem. And obviously now it's a multi chain world and then people would have different trade offs, like when to choose different things. But when they learn about Solana and learn about why they're optimizing certain things in the design, they're always willing to try it because back in 2020, there aren't that many people know about it. I think the first step really is just to having people understand how the system works and whatnot. I've been doing quite a bit of those. I think that's kind of my experience involved with Solana Foundation.Austin Federa (07:31):And Dan, as you kind of think about your role as the sort of executive director at the Solana Foundation, how do you define scope for an organization like that? What are the sort of things you're thinking about when you're thinking about initiatives that the foundation is engaging in or things the foundation is not doing and shouldn't be doing in your view?Dan (07:52):Yeah, that's an excellent question. Really, I see it as two primary areas of focus with kind of the overarching goal being broad growth of the network and the community itself without an eye towards turning a profit for the foundation. This is a nonprofit organization. We're not taking any equity investments or really taking the position to be picking winners. There's plenty of incredible innovation that's happening on Solana, lots of competing projects, lots of new stuff. And the foundation really wants to position itself to support, really talking how to provide support equally for everyone in the ecosystem. And so one of the primary thrusts, one of our main operational kind of focus points these days is really on growing the network itself from an infrastructure standpoint. That's really been my personal area of focus for really a long time now is how can we get the most number of high quality validator operators, the most humans running the most number of nodes, be it validators or RPC nodes, which serve as the API endpoints or API gateways for applications using the Solana network?And to that end, the foundation has rolled out a number of programs, really leveraging kind of the foundation's holdings of tokens, which are really allocated to grow the community and grow the network. Kind of as I see it, I don't know, maybe a bit of a personal tangent here. I originally started engaging with Solana in early 2019. I was working on the engineering team at Solana Labs and it was early stage startup. We hadn't even launched the Testnet yet, just kind of scrappy early days, trying to get everyone to understand and hey, proof of history is a real thing. We're really going to prove out this tech. And one of the things that was really hard was trying to get people to run validators. A lot of our early stage validators that helped us launch Testnet for the very first time and get Mainnet off the ground were a lot of them came from the Cosmos ecosystem.And so, we have a lot of these kind of OG longstanding validators who really helped get the Solana network off the ground came from standing on the shoulders of giants. The Cosmos ecosystem brought so much innovation to the proof of stake universe and kind of where this ties back to, in early days, myself and a couple of the early labs employees in true startup fashion, we were actually working out of one of the co-founder's basements and we hand built some of the first bare metal validators to run on the Solana network. Ordering parts on the internet, showing up in a bunch of boxes and just going forward kind of hacking on the hardware, trying to see how much performance we can squeeze out of these individual machines.We went and installed them in a data center here in the Colorado area and those nodes are still running today. Some of them are pointed at Mainnet, some of them are Testnet. And that was sort of the, I don't know, the genesis of, at least for me personally, a lot of my personal investment in seeing the growth of the validator ecosystem on Solana, having kind of physically hooked up and bootstrapped some of the first ones. And now having transitioned earlier this year to take on this role at the foundation, we maintain a program for anyone who wants to run a validator, can engage with tier one data centers all over the world that the foundation has. We've really kind of went to bat for our validator community and helped a lot of these infrastructure providers understand that, yeah, it takes a lot of horsepower to run a node on Solana and it can be hard to get your hands on some of these machines.And so in working with some of these execs at some of these older school, I'll say more traditional telco or infrastructure oriented companies, helping them to understand the value of what a powerful and secure and distributed Solana infrastructure ecosystem looks like, that's really been an exciting kind of growth track, I think for the foundation in helping to bring more hardware online and helping more people to learn to run it and get more nodes running and keep the network flying.Austin Federa (12:16):Yeah, I love the parallels to the Cosmos ecosystem being a validator ecosystem being early, early supporters of that because of course, Tendermint is also notoriously computationally intensive and runs better on bare metal than cloud so it seems like a very natural validator group to bring over in the early days.Lily, from your view, as looking over the ecosystem, what are the parts you see that are working really well in the Solana ecosystem? What do you see are areas, be it tooling, Dan talked a little about infrastructure, areas in which the foundation can make a difference in help evolving?Lily (12:53):What I think is going quite well right now is a lot of the interest in the energy and kind of the inbound on various stakeholder groups within the community. I think there's a lot of excitement from a general audience also because it's very accessible to a general audience. Again, as we were saying earlier, if it costs dollars versus hundreds of dollars to mint an NFT, that's a very meaningful difference to many people. I think general awareness has been amazing. I think there's a lot of increased developer interest and accessibility. And if you look at sort of the hackathons that we've had, probably every two or three months, three or four months in the ecosystem, the number of sort of people who are new to Web 3.0 that are starting with Solana, I think is really impressive and has grown tremendously in a very short period of time.We want to continue to extend that in various ways. And we've got a number of ideas as to sort of increasing the accessibility to even a retail audience, putting out sort of better documentation, better tooling to continue sort of onboard both maybe existing Web 3.0 developers who might be building in solidity or on sort of an EVM type environment. As well as, increasingly there's pretty substantial influx of folks coming over from Web 2.0 and thinking about where to get started and are starting off by making choices between essentially now it's really solidity or Rust and Rust, implicitly sort of Solana. And so I think that we can continue to invest in various ways of sort of helping people start within the Solana ecosystem. And I think that because Solana has grown so quickly in a very short period of time, there are also sort of ecosystem tools that are catching up right now.One thing that we hear a lot about is kind of indexing within Solana is something that we can probably improve as a community, data analytics on Solana, given that a lot of the applications are very sort of more consumer retail audience oriented is something that I think is also, actively being worked on. And so those are of the sort of near term things that people are thinking about. Obviously with the pretty tremendous growth of the ecosystem, also making it easier for people to run nodes, have access to baseline infrastructure. That's also something we've invested tremendous resources on through data center partnerships and it's known that Solana some higher hardware requirements but we've invested a lot to try to take down those various barriers. Those are some of the things that we've been thinking about.Dan (15:38):Yeah. And I would actually just kind of add to that. Some people do like to kind of harp on the interesting hardware requirements or high end hardware requirements for Solana. In the broad scope of things, when kind of the history is written about at these sorts of things, it's like, this is going to be something that's in a number of years or maybe even just a couple years, it's going to run on whatever machine you want to plug in to your home. We do have some validators that are running infrastructure out of their home. Some people choose to run in data centers. Some people do, God bless them, choose to run it in the cloud. But I think to Lily's point regarding the incredibly rapid growth of the Solana ecosystem, I think one area where we're really starting to dedicate more resources, particularly me personally and from the foundation side is on helping more people understand what Solana infrastructure really looks like.We've seen Tremendous resources and the developer relations team has put out incredible resources for new developers for Web 3.0 but the kind of tooling and community knowledge base of what does it take to run a good validator? And what does it mean to run a validator? Why should I care? I think it has a little ways to go in sort of advancing that narrative a little bit. In particular to lower the barrier to entry from, oh, you must be a sysadmin or a DevOps expert to, what I'd really love to see is all of these Web 3.0 teams and Web 3.0 app developers who are having a great time enjoying Solana and building on Solana, also participate in running the network that they so appreciate. I'd love to see more community buy in of teams that are vested in their project being built on top of a working Solana to help Solana run.What we've seen, even in just the last couple weeks or so, a number of these sort of NFT based Dow communities that have popped up on Solana over the last six months or so have started really taking this message to heart and are launching their own validator, which is just really cool to see. I know, I think Monkeydow claims the title of first Dow to launch a validator on Solana. I know the Degen Apes and the Degen community have also launched. And so it's just really cool to see these communities that really organically popped up around people enjoying NFTs and collecting these cool RNFTs that kind of blew up on Solana this summer now really starting to take a stake in the consensus and ownership and management of the network itself. And so I'm really excited to see that to start happen and really something I want to hope that the foundation can foster. And it's just something I also am excited to see the community really kind of taking it into their own hands more.Austin Federa (18:39):Yeah. I kind of love that, that it's so easy, even a monkey can do it. Is kind of the tagline there.Dan (18:47):It's perfect.Austin Federa (18:48):And the other, the Degen Apes, which are famous for having probably the least technically successful NFT launch to ever have been done by any organization have now their own validator. It's a good testament to how far we've come.Dan (19:02):It was incredible. It was such a struggle. There were all sorts of technical issues, like with the Metaplex standard had recently rolled out. They had various challenges with the mints and it was this saga that we all kind of watched unfold on Twitter and on all these channels over a number of days. And I got to give them credit. There were frustration, there was joy, there were tears. And it came out with one of the most unique, strong, enthusiastic communities on Solana having kind of gone through the fire of this rocky birth that was the minting process. More power to them. I just thought it was just so cool.Austin Federa (19:48):Yeah. I love how that all gets constructed. Kind of, along those lines, you Dan, you came initially from Solana Labs, you were one of the early engineers in the ecosystem. You're now working at the foundation. What's that transition been like? How closely do you still work with people like Raj and Anatoly? What's that relationship like?Dan (20:08):Yeah. I think the working relationship it's really interesting. There has been obviously, Solana, the whole network was built and originally launched, all the code came out of Solana Labs, where Raj and Toly run the organization. And they're obviously major players in the Solana ecosystem. This is the vision and the hustle that they've really brought to the table has been instrumental in kind of getting the whole community and the whole Solana ecosystem and the tech stack to really where it is today I think. Where we relate from the foundation is as sort of industry peers, I would say, sure, I talk to Raj and Toly, I talk with a lot of the ecosystem teams, I talk with our board and Lily and so many people that have an interest in Solana's success on the broadest terms and that's to really what the foundation is here to foster. As we continue to grow and expand and evolve our kind of working relationships with a lot of these organizations, I think just continues to evolve and expand.Austin Federa (21:22):And Mabel, looking at, you mentioned a bunch of the work you were doing was helping grow Solana in new markets. Can you talk a little bit about that? And I think, a lot of people, especially who are not working in the region, there's a lot of information around whether cryptocurrency is going to be banned in India or China, sort of how do you view some of those approaches?Mabel (21:44):Yeah, definitely. I'll answer the first part of the questions. I think it's going to be pretty much the same line as what Lily and Dan just mentioned but I'll kind of carve out those into details. I'd say, at the beginning you are also, you definitely need to engage a lot of these staking facilities but these people here it's quite differentiated because many of them are running the mining pools, meaning the proof of work mining pools. I remember back in the days, in 2019, 2020, we were talking to a bunch of those and happened to be that a lot of those are just crashing their wifi in the office. It's pretty funny. But at the same time, Dom who's from Solana Labs, we're trying to age of all of these mining pools and then we're just giving out some of those GPUs.But I think that's in the past. Now a lot more validators are actually starting from East Asia. I think there's some problem with in the past, with your location being far from the US so that's it's harder because Amazon cloud and whatnot but I think basically there's what Dan mentioned earlier, I think this will be a problem that can be solved in the future. I thought that was a pretty interesting thing to bootstrap at the beginning. And then the other things like wallets and non-custodial wallets, custodial wallets, because I think for East Asian crypto, you can never kind of ignore the centralized parties and players, especially I think in the past 24 month all the way till the next 12 month or whatever. I think a lot of those custodial wallets, including some of those exchanges, it was a lot of very pivotal work to try to engage them to support Solana, to support STL, USDC, USCT and a lot of the other stablecoins. I think, those steps that we were able to achieve in the past year in order to get a lot of these centralized exchanges to support those, I think that's also pretty interesting.Mabel (23:50):I think the other thing is that you just generally need to go to wherever because like back in the days in 2 18, 19 and 20, not that many groups are fully aware of how Solana works or even if it's like in Rust, I think people here I'd say safely were more familiar with things like Polkadot than Solana back in the days. Talking to some of those developers and just telling them, there's a few different options and then go to some of the hackathons or just developer meetups or even just the Rust China conferences, and then to promote about it. Justin Stery, he spoke there. A lot of these engagement opportunities definitely helped over the past two years for Solana to really get the writers here.I think that work still continue. And I think I believe that there will be a lot more application focused developers coming over, given from the history of Web 2.0, you see a lot of your infrastructure was built in the West but then application wise actually quite a few of them came from the East. I think, for Solana, for anything that's building on top of the smart contract platform, we could probably spec on the same track. You'll see a lot of people are going to build on top. Now once all of these are available.I think one interesting thing is that for things like wallet, you have Phantom for browser because I think in the West, people are pretty used to using browser wallet but I think here in the East, you also need something that has really good user experience and people like to go mobile first. And that's why Slope Finance, which is one of the leading mobile wallet for Solana in China, they were doing really well because they understand the user behavior and all of those to deliver to the specific audience. I thought this is like quite interesting how you will need to focus on specific areas, the same thing for East and West but then you want to make sure that people get to have the best culturally fitting choices for them so that way you can actually get it around.And then to answer the second part of the questions, so I actually the other day had a tweet about similar lines. There's a lot of Web 2.0 venture capitals and then some of the other funded funds, they're trying to deploy money and then we're asking it's still East Asia or some of the other places around still relevant because of the policy. The way I read this is that crypto is really global. I understand that there's certain restriction for developers to issue cryptocurrencies in China or in some of the other countries. However, I think the language circle and then user behavior, what I just mentioned was always going to be something more pivotal than the actual restriction. These people will move to somewhere else in Asia but they will continue to build. And then for people who want to use the kind of user experience for those products who are sitting here.I think crypto liquidity is global but user experience is always regional. And I think, if you're growing an ecosystem, you can't ignore that. I'd say I'm still bullish. And I think people are recognizing some a lot of those things are just better built on Solana because it's higher performance. And then at the end, it's just about how you make sure that you are compliant to the place that you are at. And then not definitely go with the compliance part but then also not hindering yourself building.Austin Federa (27:23):Lily, Dan, do you have anything to add on growth in new markets and that process?Lily (27:29):Yeah. On new markets, we started to invest in building out the ecosystem in India, back in June and July. And it's no secret, there's extremely large both user bases and also developer communities. I think in the most recent hackathon, after the US, the second largest contributor of developers, developer submissions to the hackathon was from India. And I think Indonesia was in the top four as well. And so I think as we continue to look to Eastern Europe, for example, Latin America, Africa, some of the early narratives as to what applications would be unique and sort of the 10X type of functionality on crypto, have been talked about and written about for years, if not decades. And for example, payment applications Which become supercharged when you take DeFi functionality, global liquidity pools and they make that adjacent to an actual you potentially consumer transaction.And I think that that to me, it's very clear that that's going to happen on Solana first. And so, what I'm particularly excited about is some of those seemingly sort of everyday type of transactions but those actually becoming very unique when you, for example, can take a stablecoin and have a Venmo feeling type of transaction or a WeChat pay feeling type of transaction but it's actually fully decentralized, fully on chain and also comes with a potentially a suite of financial services that are kind of baked into the ecosystem adjacent to that. I think those are the types of things that are going to resonate hugely in emerging markets, in new markets. And those are some of the things that I'm excited about maybe exploring in new markets.Austin Federa (29:10):Yeah. I do love how sort of culturally infectious the crypto mindset is. That to use a network, you also have to be an owner of the network and that the success of the network and the success of you as a user are tied in a way that they're really not in the setup of a stock corporation or something along those lines. You can sort of think of these things in some ways as giant digital co-ops that are all working towards this goal. It's really interesting to kind of hear that. And I'm really curious to see in the future, how that starts influencing culture. I think we're already seeing crypto just barely start to influence culture and that might take off a bit in the future. Be interesting to see.Lily (29:54):I think it is. And I think what's under the surface with crypto but what rapidly rises to the surface is that it's been talked about, written about philosophically for a very, very long time, this whole idea of a veil of ignorance, that your opportunity set is determined in large part sort of where you're geographically born today, rather than you know who you are as a person and what's in your heart and what's in your mind. And with crypto, you sort of have this radical accessibility. It's almost sort of radical equality if you will, in a way that we haven't really observed in a long time. And so I think that's really upending in so many different ways and that for me is a big part of why I continue to be interested in cryptocurrency. And also why I think Solana is really going to be at the forefront of that because all of those sorts of ideas, the accessibility, the sort of the very concept of why Web 3.0 is important and where people are most likely to get started on that today is the sort of general awareness funnels.People will hear about Bitcoin. They'll learn about Bitcoin. They'll learn about store value and people will resonate with that. Your average person will resonate with that because it sounds so much like digital goals. But then once they start to learn about Bitcoin, they're like, okay, I've bought it, I get it. It's kind of like gold for the digital age. What's next? Well can I do DeFi on Bitcoin? Eh, no, not really. Lightning, we've been talking about it since 2015. Soon.And then very quickly from there, people move on to, okay, well here, well that's really amazing. These sort of new applications. And I have some friends who bought NFTs and then they click a button and it's a $100 later. Gosh. Oh, that was painful. And I think that's kind of what a number of people have gone through so far. And so people sort of get onboarded to why this is important, why this is really sort of very exciting and part of the future. And then eventually what I've seen is so many people sort of end up with being in the Solana ecosystem. I guess what I'm excited about is accelerating that and maybe making it a little bit less of a circuitous journey.Mabel (31:59):I have a story to share related to what we were talking about here. I think, I now all of these protocols are starting to talk about Shopify type of experience, which is you have an underlying protocol and then you just have different ends. You just host a different way. It's actually not just for the cultural purpose. One story was shared by Roneil who's the co-founder of Audius, last week with me. He was saying that he realized because Audius is actually not, I think the main front end was not allowed in China at some point but then somebody actually set up a separate front end that's actually and filter out and then based on whatever the local compliance should be let a whole thing run. That front end actually works.He was exactly kind of explaining to me how he was amazed by Audius should be the underlying protocol and then it should be determined by the front end itself on the ground, what to feature versus not. And everybody can have their own choices. That's a freedom choice. Nobody's going to question that. I thought that was like really amazing. It's definitely beat beyond just kind of I think this is really relevant to what we were talking about earlier because I think for Solana, it's the same thing, a lot of the things. It may not be compliant for a certain reason in the region but I think at the end it's about the front end. It's not about the protocol. The protocol should be permissionless. Anyone else can just do whatever they want but for the ones that you want to make it work for a certain region, you can just do that. I thought that was really, really amazing and very unique about crypto.Austin Federa (33:30):Yeah. I love that, that sort of view that because of the financial incentives with crypto, you can decouple the application layer from the protocol layer, that those two things can be separate. This is in some ways, this is the dream of Twitter. We had this glorious few years where there were all these Twitter clients and then it all got, because the app engine was introduced, it all got consolidated down to twitter.com and the Twitter mobile apps. And RIP all of our favorite Twitter clients from back in the day. I love that, that the way this technology is built, it allows you to really separate those two things at origin, as opposed to having to think about the business models that support that over the long term.Dan (34:09):I would actually add, I think there's interesting things happening, both in the decoupling of that, like you said, the application and the protocol there but also an interesting sort of coupling there kind of to Lily's point about this shared ownership of the success of the project. And that's really this kind of shared ownership of the network is really the kind of core underpinning, this core idea that underpins this idea of staking on a proof of steak network. Which is your success is tied to the success and this really the security of the network. And what we're starting to see now are applications and DeFi applications, particularly stake pools that have recently launched on Solana that really bring the ability to participate in the shared security and shared ownership of the network to the application layer.There have been a bunch of community launched stake pools. There's some private stake pools. The foundation is in the process of transitioning its entire treasury over to stake pools, which are really this, I think we did a whole podcast episode on this recently so I won't belabor the technical details here but basically it gives people an easy way to enter and exit from a liquid position, which is actively helping to secure the network via staking to various validators in the underlying smart contract. But what I think is really interesting about this is we're starting to see these public stake pools that pop up, Marinade Finance, JPool, Socient, Lido and a few others that are really bringing the application experience, that really slick, fast, fast and cheap promise of what does it feel like to just use a useful service built on top of Solana and oh, how cool that a normal user can transact in these stake pool tokens rather than unstaked SOL.And I think we recently saw the first, there was an NFT sale or an NFT mint that was accepting stake pool tokens, a staked SOL positions, rather unstaked SOL. So we're starting to see this adoption of people who are not only just developing apps and playing around on the application layer but also recognizing that there's tremendous value in sort of moving the denominator of how we transact value on Solana to be pegged to the participation of securing the network itself.Austin Federa (36:40):Yeah, that's a really great point. Looking forwards, Looking into this year of 2022, what are the things that you see in Web 3.0 and crypto that have potential that could become trends that are going to advance and increase? I'll kind of start out. One of my big ones that I think is we're going to see a lot of the sort of tech-ish companies adopting decentralized Web 3.0 technologies as a competitive advantage to compete with a lot of vertically integrated companies. I think you're going to see a lot in payroll. You're going to see a lot in merchant payments, concert tickets. These companies that don't have platform scale are going to look to Web 3.0 as a competitive advantage. And you might see that role into the rest of the ecosystem. Dan, I'm curious kind of what your thoughts are. And we'll just go around the room here.Dan (37:30):Yeah, I think your spot on there, Austin. And I think one of the things that's really going to help unlock that is these sort of higher levels of abstraction of developer tooling and more sort of almost enterprise API access, if you will, to provide a more Web 2.0 like interface experience that someone could just plug in and it's Solana as a service. There's your SaaS for 2022 and it's instant settlement in stablecoins on Solana but no one needs to worry about the fact that it's a stablecoin on Solana. It's they integrate this API and the money transfers or the token transfers from merchant to customer or vendor to seller, whoever, immediately. I think that starting to see people using crypto and using blockchain without realizing that they're using a blockchain technology.Austin Federa (38:22):Lily, what are your 2022 predictions?Lily (38:25):I think industry wide I'm with you that Web 3.0 is going to become the starting point rather than sort of the periphery. I think that we're well on our way where Web 3.0 is going to sort of foment this decentralized center. And I think that there's a few things that are sort of going to happen alongside, in my perspective. One is this kind of movement towards multichain slash interchain future is just accelerating. I think that there's a few sort of different consolations within the ecosystem. There's clearly sort of the EVM world which we're going to have a connection to through Neon EVM. There's a lot of sort of obviously energy within Solana. There's some other, IBC, we talked about Cosmos a little a bit is probably another sort of approach within that and then connectors within these.And so I think there's various foci that are going to emerge there and increasingly there is going to be sort of those sort of layer ones are actually, I think, going to be abstracted away over time as they probably should be when you talk about sort of appeal to your average person. I think that another theme that I see emerging is as more institutions want to get into this and compliance with existing regulatory frameworks, institutional KYC and tooling to allow institutions to participate in decentralized liquidity pools, which I think is going to be pretty exciting. And so that's where the existing world is actually going to start getting onboarded in earnest into Web 3.0. That's going to be quite interesting.I think with that, there's a big theme around a sort of identity and privacy and on chain identity and having a little bit more control over your data on chain is another big thing, the theme that's going to evolve. And then, certainly in a consumer area, I think that NFTs went from being a very analog sort of digital representation of physical art and have now morphed into basically being the entry point into sort of Web 3.0 communities and metaverse and these kind of almost new communities, dare I say civilizations that are starting to sprout online. And so those are some of the from the more institutional to the more consumer, I think there's just so much happening out there. That's all really just going to continue to develop at a rapid pace in 2022.Austin Federa (40:49):And Mabel, what do you see for 2022?Mabel (40:51):Yeah. I'd like to maybe talk a little bit more about the application as in the middleware layer. Especially the crypto native ones. We've seen a lot of DeFi activities, 2020, 2021 for on Solana specifically because people like how fast transactions are like. But I think what's more excited, also something that I've been spending a lot of time thinking about and then exploring is that the actual kind of Web 3.0 application experience, what does that mean? People have been talking about metaverse so to speak for a long time but the things people can do beyond finance is never really happening before but I think there are, we've seen from a lot of the recent hackathons that you'll have address to address IM protocols, you have some of the Web 3.0 social graph where you can just basically have the relationship you with another person.And then another, some of the other things open C collections or some of the other things that you did. And then you also have things like on chain credentialing protocols. All of these, we are seeing them happening on Solana. And then with all of these composable, with each other, you can actually see that you have relationship between people in a game, for example. Or when you bootstrap a new application with the social graph, you can you customize the front page that you push to the users based on the social graph because like you have all those data. Obviously what Lily said about privacy preservation was very, very important. You don't want to share everything, which kind of it's kind of against the purpose but I think the idea is that for Web 3.0, you own the data.You are the one who approves the blockchain or whoever else to access your data of all eth and you control whether you approve someone to be your public connected contact. And then things like on chain credentials, you can prove, what are some of your achievements based on the contribution off chain. At this court discussion or things like whatever you've provided liquidity in the past for certain period of time or you just basically voted every single time in the community snapshot. All of these become your kind of on chain resumes or on chain badges that can later on help whatever you prioritize into a community. It's the such thing we call gated community. I think all of these are coming together. We're going to see actual consumer experience available on Solana. I thought that was extremely exciting because I think with all of these enabled, people will have no difference of experience compared to some of the other Web 2.0 application experience. I thought that's going to be very huge.Austin Federa (43:35):Well, thank you all for joining us today. It's fun to talk about some of these things that are not quite as pressing, as user facing that developers aren't picking up and doing but are nonetheless integral to the network and it's growth and its future. And I think it's really fun to talk with the names and some of the people behind the Solana Foundation. Thanks for joining us today.Lily (44:00):Thanks for having us, Austin.Mabel (44:01):Thank you.Dan (44:02):Great to be here. Thanks a lot.

Hundred.finance have a bold vision to be the primary borrowing and lending platform across 100 different blockchains. That's quite an ambitious goal, but they may well pull it up given the team.In this podcast you will learn:- Why the future of DeFi will be multi-chain- Thoughts on the Wormhole hack and considerations when bridging- Lessons from the "DeFi Summer"- veToken model explained- What is Solidly and the role of NFTs in DeFiThis episode is packed with educational content!Website: https://hundred.finance/Twitter: https://twitter.com/HundredFinanceTo find out more about ReFi visit: https://www.reimagined.fi/

On this episode of Empire, Jason Yanowitz and Mike Ippolito are joined by Qiao Wang and Imran Khan of AllianceDAO. Not only are Qiao and Imran announcing big news about launching AllianceDAO & raising $50 Million, but they're also diving into all their thoughts on what DeFi Summer set up for the current state of crypto, the metaverse & gaming projects they're interested in. You won't want to miss this! -- ParaSwap: If you want to make a swap at the best price across the DeFi market, check out paraswap.io. ParaSwap's state-of-the-art algorithm beats the market price across all major DEXs and brings you the most optimized swaps with the best prices, and lowest slippage. Find out more about them at https://www.paraswap.io/ -- Empire is brought to you by Blockworks, a financial media brand delivering breaking news and premium insights about digital assets to millions of investors. For more content like this, subscribe to Blockworks' free daily newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter/ Follow me and Santiago on Twitter, @JasonYanowitz and @santiagoroel; let us know what you thought of the show! Subscribe to the podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4UTePv1CR3APdKOiosR3Iq?si=41bc452345b649f9 Subscribe to the podcast on Apple: https://apple.co/3srZf7M 

DeFi Slate dHEDGE Pool Is Live: Participate in the crypto revolution on Polygon offering tiny gas fees and outsized returns with DeFi Slate by your side!DeFi Slate Fam:The DEX space has seen a lot of changes since DeFi Summer. A lot of positive ones and some interesting experiments for sure. An OG in the DeFi space is Bancor who are working on their V3 protocol. Now, in this podcast we don't talk just about Bancor, we go over DEX tokenomics, the creation of proper emissions and inflation schedules, and how overall DeFi as a whole can create long-term sustainable yields. For all of you who are new, there´s a lot of crazy high APYs but these obviously aren´t gonna be around in 1, 2 3 years. The key for us right now is just to buckle up and build long-term products. Learn about building long-term sustainable yields in today's podcast with Mark Richardson and Nathaniel Hindman and enjoy this one as it will shape the rest of DeFi for the coming years.Cheers,Andy🙌 Sponsor Spotlight: Zerion, the #1 place to invest in DeFi! Swap, earn, borrow, lend!DeFi by Design EP59: Building Sustainable Yields in DeFi w Impermanent Loss Protection🙌 Together with: Degate, a Decentralized Layer 2 Exchange based on optimistic rollups. DeGate will offer secure order-book trading that is faster and cheaper than mainnet. Degate also offers a fast and efficient L1 - L2 Bridge, testnet is operating now. Try it HERE!DeFi Saver, is your hub for advanced DeFi management including automation and liquidation protection on Aave & MakerDAO. Join their discord to learn more about the community!DeversiFi is a layer 2 exchange providing deep order books so you can avoid gas costs and frustration, saving you time and money with every trade or swap. DeFi should be open to everyone, not just whales. Join their community on Discord now!QiDAO is one of the newer, most exciting DeFi primitives that introduces ZERO interest loans to DeFi. Their money market product along with their stable coin $MAI is available on Polygon, Avalanche, Fantom and Ethereum! Multichain MAXIS! Check it out, and get your first ZERO interest loan in DeFi! Join their community on Discord now!GoGo is building the world's first non-custodial, decentralized asset manager using NFT smart vaults and is allowing ANYONE to start yield farming on polygon with just a few clicks! So easy your grandma could do it! Join their community on Telegram now!Dhedge is a decentralized asset management protocol facilitating the future of co-investing & fund management. When you invest in top performing pools you earn rewards in DHT tokens! Join their community on Telegram now!🔥 Partner Project UpdatesPolygonHermez is an open-source ZK-Rollup optimized for secure, low-cost and usable token transfers on the wings of Ethereum. Check it out here!Zerion is a DeFi dashboard AND mobile app that enables any smartphone holder, anywhere in the world, to build and manage their decentralized finance (DeFi) portfolio. Check it out here!Pangolin is a community-driven decentralized exchange with fast settlement, low transaction fees, and the best trading opportunities to maximize your yield. Check it out here!Make sure to check out the Pangolin Roadmap Q1 2022: HERE⚠️ DISCLAIMER: Investing into cryptocurrency and DeFi platforms comes with inherent risk including technical risk, human error, platform failure and more. At certain points throughout this post, we might get commission for promoting certain projects, if this is the case we will always make sure it is clear. We are strictly an educational content platform, nothing we offer is financial advice. We are not professionals or licensed advisors.Liked this post? Share with a friend :)🚀 Join Our Inner Circle And Become A Certified DeFi Degen!🚨 Want to learn DeFi from Silicon Valley Investors & Entrepreneurs? Check out the DeFi Masterclass Here!🌐Check Us Out On Twitter!🚀Join the community on Telegram Channel to get our free V.1. yield farming guide!🎤Subscribe to our YouTube channel!👩‍💻Join the DeFi Slate DAO Discord Server!🖼 Interested in NFTs? Check out our new project NFT Slate!Last week in review:MetisDAO L2 Summer Incoming: Yield Farming & Airdrops GuideL2 NFTs Are About to Explode: Here's What You Need To KnowDeFi by Design EP58: Exploring Zk-Rollups & Modular Blockchains w SyscoinCheck out some previous interviews:DeFi Slate x Nate Hindman: AMMs & Bancor V2DeFi Slate x TheEther: A social governance experience for EthereumDeFi Slate x Jeff Jihoz: Web 3.0 Gaming Axie InfinityDeFi Slate x Nick Fett: Oracles, Tellor, and the future of DeFiRecent tweets: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit defislate.substack.com

Name of Guests: Sid, Rob, Heesh, & Nick Name of Project: Spirit Swap Twitter URL of Guests: https://twitter.com/Deg3ntrades https://twitter.com/neir_rob https://twitter.com/Heesh56107323 Project Twitter URL: https://twitter.com/Spirit_Swap Project URL: https://www.spiritswap.finance/ Rob Background in video game development went to school for it. Kept up to speed read bitcoin standard Move on from job 1.5 years ago as a video game dev at Mirosoft Heesh was teaching him a few things about DeFi Said, lets build something Heesh Crypto in 2017 crash with nothing to actually do in crypto Started using Synthetix and other projects Ethereum Liked smart contracts Was following Fantom since 2019 DeFi Summer came and got completely into DeFi and farming, etc. Sid Computer science background Internship at the bank Blockchain Sid and rob met through work Nick Ascension into the core team Read the bitcoin white paper one day hung over Did some research, but couldn't figure it out at the time 2013 when he started seeing Bitcoin get price action 2017 he's working in digital marketing Saw Ethereum Used EtherDelta one of the first dex Discovered Fantom and was early in the ecosystem Staking for collateral and minting stables fascinated him Then Spirit Swap came out and became a community member So decided to move him up on to the team Setup structure and managing the community Discussed meritocracy of DeFi Spirit swap as leaders Use Gather as their office space Heesh, Rob, and other members of the team have met in person Leading in the community is a big part of their mission and they reach out to new projects to help them. They understand wanting to grow Fantom is important for them and all of Fantom. They have to build trust with projects and it is difficult to look into each project to make sure there are no issues. They feel like the responsibility is very important. Nick and Sid handle a lot of the due diligence Try to get them to dox to them to meet them and get to know. First project together was an NFT project called NFDoge That was how they learned what each member of the team was good at and what roles they would have Canceled the project and moved on to Spirit Great lessons about getting to know each other and starting on a simple project first. Fail and then move on. If you start small and can have limited success and move your community over They did want to move into a hedge fund / asset management and worked on planning that. Then they saw from that what was missing on Fantom and decided to build a dex Discussed how Nick helped them create an operational plan and think about what they are building. How they all were receptive to getting organized. Started with a Uniswap fork. Focusing now on building a stronger AMM. Focusing on the exchange components more Deleted Alpha! Other new releases Ecosystem pools Ape mode 1-click leverage long Missionary / Mercenary What is next What their philosophy is about the project Moving to a full DAO and the steps they have to take to get there. The impact of OlympusDAO and other projects on Spirit Swap New UI and how many team members they have --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/missiondefi/support

This week, we're excited to welcome Dillon Francis. Dillon Francis is a chart topping electronic musician, record producer and DJ. Throughout 2021 Dillon has been experimenting with clever ways to engage his community and drive growth through NFTs, and in this episode we work through how other musicians can do the same. In this episode we cover:- Why he feels NFTs are similar to the early days of EDM- Some of his recent projects like DeFi Summer with Chad Knight on Nifty Gateway, the Charity NFTs with Nicole Ruggerio and Hard Fork & Harder Fork with Pizza Slime- As an active supporter of DeFi, what are his thoughts on the intersection of DeFi and NFTs- His thoughts on the future of Metaverse music performances- What excites him the most about the future of NFTs- And much more...To sign up for the nft now newsletter, where we break down the NFT market into actionable insights each week, go to https://www.nftnow.com To follow Dillon Francis on Twitter, go here: https://twitter.com/DillonFrancisTo follow Dillon Francis on Instagram, go here: https://www.instagram.com/dillonfrancis See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Kolten Bergeron joins Mark11 in the studio to talk about everything Liquity! They dive into Kolten's crypto background, how DAO's differ from corporations, the growing pains of DAOs, the trade-offs associated with having a fee-based token vs a typical governance token like other protocols, and why every stablecoin is not the same.What they touch on:- What is Liquity? (2:41)- Distributed front-end operators (4:13)- Kolten's crypto background (6:22)- Kolten and the Stellar Development Foundation (8:52)- First ETH & BTC purchases (10:06)- Trails and tribulations of investing in crypto (11:31)- Defi Summer (12:32)- Kolten's intro to OHM (13:50)- Kolten's first impressions of Olympus (15:48)- How collateralized loans work and redemption mechanisms (18:41)- Taking loans out against your assets and its implications (23:26)- Liquity Frontend Operators (26:05)- Liquity roadmap (28:57)- Trade-offs of having immutable parameters (31:55)- The Liquity community (34:38)- Having a fee-capture token vs governance (37:14)- Can Liquity move to L2? (38:57)- DAO's efficiency vs inefficiency when managing complex procedures and responsibilities (45:20)- What's coming up for Liquity? (50:27)- Difference vs risks of other stablecoins (54:01)Links:- Liquity: http://www.liquity.org- Kolten: https://twitter.com/0xKoltenOlympus Agora:- Twitter: https://twitter.com/OlympusAgora- Medium: https://medium.com/@olympusagora- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCr34Uxn8LwJUEJVBYBGzmog- Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/olympusagoraHosts:- Dropkickdarren: https://twitter.com/dropkickdarren- Mark11: https://twitter.com/Mark11ETHIf you're looking to contribute to the podcast- or think you can add something to our product quality, what are you waiting for Ohmie? Come and join us in the OlympusDAO discord!https://discord.gg/f9s9YgWxVp

Join Piers Ridyard and Spencer Graham, Project Lead of DAOhaus, in this episode of the DeFi Download, to find out what a DAO is and how to summon one.Spencer Graham is the Project Lead of DAOhaus. DAOhaus is a community-owned and operated no-code platform for launching and operating Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. Its framework is based on the open-source code of Moloch.[0:42] What exactly is a DAO, and why is it important?[3:22] What distinguishes DAOs from previous entities such as collectives, partnerships, and unincorporated corporations that provide a sense of belonging and purpose to groups of people? What is the relationship between blockchain, distributed and public ledger technology, and this new type of organization and management?[7:06] Is the path to the formation of DAOs distinct from the path of human society from small villages to institutionalized power and the invention of representative and direct democracy? If so, how does it differ, and what role does the control of capital play in that difference?[10:59] What are the benefits of DAOs, and what are the drawbacks?[14:19] The ability of decentralized ledger technology to incentivize people to act in their own best interests.[16:02] DAOhaus: What does it mean to be a no-code platform for creating and administering DAOs, and why should it matter to you? The story behind The DAO and its hack.[19:01] Summoning Moloch DAO and the beginnings of the DeFi Summer[23:28] What function have Moloch DAOs served? Why would someone want to summon a Moloch DAO or a DAOhaus DAO? What are the benefits of a no-code way of creation for developers?[29:09] What exactly is a Safe Minion?[34:13] What is the Boosts Marketplace, and how does it work?[37:38] DAOhaus' perspective and strategy on NFTsFurther resourcesWebsite: daohaus.club Discord: discord.gg/daohausTwitter: @nowdaoit  

LinksHaseeb TwitterWebShow PartnerThis episode is presented by FTX. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/ftxShow NotesCobie & Ledger Haseeb QureshiUpOnlyTV NotesHaseeb Intro ⁃ Managing partner at Dragonfly Capital (@dragonfly_cap) ⁃ Formerly a professional poker player then learned to code and became a software engineer at Airbnb before moving into crypto ⁃ Full time crypto in 2017 doing security research, worked at 21/Earn, a stable coin startup and then into the investment sidePoker & Crypto ⁃ Cobie: Why are there so many poker people in crypto? Haseeb: They're willing to do weird things to make money, predisposition to it. It rewards being a little bit obsessive ⁃ Very few poker players in VC roles much more that are traders ⁃ Poker has also been getting worse as an economy and harder to make a living from itDragonfly Capital & Investing ⁃ Multistage firm, will invest at all stages of a project, doing both equity and token deals ⁃ Ledger: Is one easier than the other when it comes to making decisions? Haseeb: Equity liquidity is decided for you, the rest of the time you're along for the ride which makes things easier ⁃ Long term investments in tokens and will have lockup's 2-4 years but tend to hold beyond that even when liquid. Sometimes things run quicker than expected and it makes sense to exit but still holding most things today ⁃ Crypto markets aren't efficient so even knowing marginally more than the average trader is enough to make money ⁃ When it comes to project performance: Winners keep winning ⁃ If Dragonfly buy tokens that are already live they'll negotiate with the DAO or OTC ⁃ Ledger: Do you give any weighting to revenue back to token holders tokenomics? e.g. Uni vs Sushi? Haseeb: Markets are forward looking, lack of revenue to holders right now is less important than them being the market leader and future developmentsBiggest Misses? ⁃ Uniswap. Hayden wanted Dragonfly in the round but it didn't seem sustainable and completely missed it ⁃ Has seed round memos for Solana @ .04 but they didn't act on it (~4000x) as well as for TerraMaking It & Diversification ⁃ Haseeb: Multicoin Capital became a titan from leading the Solana round ⁃ Cobie: Great example of only needing one big win to make it. People come in with too low of time horizons and have losses leverage trading trying to play catch-up. ⁃ It's like making 10 high conviction thesis driven investments and watching them carefully to see if what you expected to happen, happens. Am I right, am I wrong, and why? ⁃ Haseeb: Diversification is powerful. If returns are power of law distributed the optimal strategy is to be maximally diversified ⁃ Ledger: I used to mock the idea of keeping moon bags but I've seen enough that's just kept going up so much more than anticipated ⁃ But, you also can't put your fate into something that continues to underperformMulti-chain Future & L1 vs ETH vs L2 ⁃ Line of sand is between EVM chains and non-EVM chains ⁃ The EVM is the lingua franca , all of the tooling has been built with one ecosystem in mind. Equivalent to JavaScript, it wasn't the best language but it became the thing you had to write in ⁃ Thesis has been broadly that the L1s end up winning over L2s due to L2 constraints e.g. security model ⁃ L1s have more flexibility ⁃ Cobie: What about Bitcoin? Haseeb: Bitcoin is digital gold, it's been around long enough and held up – so it's strength now is in not changing. Ledger: Feel like it will underperform in emerging bull markets but hold up better in bear marketsWhat's Next? ⁃ Synthetic assets still feel under-explored and under-appreciated ⁃ Grandmother is old-school and was buying gold instead of relying on the Rupee. The reason people aren't buying other assets is due to a lack of access ⁃ Crypto is about global permission-less access and it's not about being able to offer it in the US but elsewhere ⁃ DeFi has evolved less and not grown that much since DeFi Summer ended. There aren't enough people that are technical enough to build it out ⁃ Vast majority of people in the world are living month to month and not concerned about interest ratesFinal Alpha⁃ In crypto it's really easy to overthink things and the obvious thing is usually rightNotes by LukeMusic by GiovanniPickle

It's hard to believe it has been a year since Michael Casey and Sheila Warren launched the “Money Reimagined” podcast. This episode is sponsored by Quantstamp And what a year it has been: some rich, probing discussions about the past and future of money, the challenges of regulation and blockchain governance, the battle for financial inclusion, the shifting geopolitical landscape, the anthropology of money and much, much more. All of that while the crypto market soared to a valuation of more than $2 trillion, NFTs went parabolic, the U.S. government got tougher with the sector, China kicked out its bitcoin miners, El Salvador made bitcoin a legal tender, DeFi innovation exploded, and a relentless pandemic continued with no end in sight. To look back on all of that and to help them celebrate this anniversary, Michael and Sheila were joined by a pair who delivered one of the more memorable discussions of the past year: Jill Carlson, the founder of the Open Money Initiative, and Raoul Pal, CEO and founder of Real Vision. With the controversial recent rollout of El Salvador's Bitcoin project as its backdrop, the discussion updated the somewhat competing perspective that Carlson and Pal had explored in a December 11 episode last year on whether speculation on bitcoin as an asset is compatible with its prospects as a tool for payments and financial inclusion for the poor.This episode was produced and edited by Michele Musso with announcements by Adam B. Levine and additional production support by Eleanor Pahl. Our theme song is Shepard. -Quantstamp is the leader of blockchain security, having secured over 100 billion USD worth of digital assets. Visit quantstamp.com to learn why top DeFi projects like Maker, Compound and BarnBridge trust Quantstamp to secure the financial infrastructure of tomorrow. Learn more at quantstamp.com/blog.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It's hard to believe it has been a year since Michael Casey and Sheila Warren launched the “Money Reimagined” podcast. This episode is sponsored by Quantstamp And what a year it has been: some rich, probing discussions about the past and future of money, the challenges of regulation and blockchain governance, the battle for financial inclusion, the shifting geopolitical landscape, the anthropology of money and much, much more. All of that while the crypto market soared to a valuation of more than $2 trillion, NFTs went parabolic, the U.S. government got tougher with the sector, China kicked out its bitcoin miners, El Salvador made bitcoin a legal tender, DeFi innovation exploded, and a relentless pandemic continued with no end in sight. To look back on all of that and to help them celebrate this anniversary, Michael and Sheila were joined by a pair who delivered one of the more memorable discussions of the past year: Jill Carlson, the founder of the Open Money Initiative, and Raoul Pal, CEO and founder of Real Vision. With the controversial recent rollout of El Salvador's Bitcoin project as its backdrop, the discussion updated the somewhat competing perspective that Carlson and Pal had explored in a December 11 episode last year on whether speculation on bitcoin as an asset is compatible with its prospects as a tool for payments and financial inclusion for the poor.This episode was produced and edited by Michele Musso with announcements by Adam B. Levine and additional production support by Eleanor Pahl. Our theme song is Shepard. -Quantstamp is the leader of blockchain security, having secured over 100 billion USD worth of digital assets. Visit quantstamp.com to learn why top DeFi projects like Maker, Compound and BarnBridge trust Quantstamp to secure the financial infrastructure of tomorrow. Learn more at quantstamp.com/blog.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello fellow crypto users, Amun token holders and all the hodlers out there. My name is Crian and I am one of the community managers here at Amun. Welcome to the first episode of the Inside Crypto Podcast. This episode was recorded on July 29th 2021. Today we interview our VP of Tokens, James Wang. Coming from a diverse background, he fills us in on what Amun does, where the company is going and what we can expect in the future. We also touch on some news topics including the Defi Summer, where the smart money is going in crypto next, and crypto.com users doubling. Thanks everyone for listening and don't forget to tune in next week where we interview another member of the team and get their insights into the fascinating world of crypto. (OhiXUPhOw2ucRZlTUIch) News Covered Today: 1.    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/defi-summer-blockchain-heating-142126320.html (DeFi Summer Is Here - The Blockchain Is Heating Up) 2.    https://fortune.com/2021/07/29/crypto-investing-where-smart-money-going-next-andreessen-horowitz-nfts-cathie-wood-ark/ (Where the smart money in crypto investing is going next) 3.    https://www.coindesk.com/crypto-user-numbers-double-in-six-months (Crypto User Numbers Double in 6 Months) Follow Us: https://twitter.com/AmunTokens (Twitter) https://discord.com/invite/Hfr7XFgNxV (Discord) https://t.me/AmunTokens (Telegram)  

The President of the Minority Programmers Association, visits the studio to discuss their mission to inspire and grow the minority programmer population in the blockchain community. Blockchain, and Stellar in particular, for the first time allows unprecedented access to the global financial infrastructure once blocked from minorities in various countries across the planet. He shares insight on his exciting experience in Blockchain, how he got connected with the Stellar Development Foundation and why it's his mission to inspire more awareness and growth for minorities in this space. Visit Minority Programmers Association Explore Stellar Global: Stellar-global.org Follow Sam Conner on Twitter @samconnerone Follow Sam Conner on YouTube YouTube.com/c/samconner Follow Sam Conner on Twitch Twitch.tv/samconnerxlm Learn more about Stellar and the Stellar Development Foundation: Stellar.org and on Twitter at @StellarOrg --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/samconner/support

Take one step closer to sovereignty every single week, join the DeFi Slate community below:Spotify | YouTube | iTunes | R.S.S. FeedDeFi Slate Fam: A major part of the ethos in DeFi is Collaboration over Competition. As the native DeFi protocols grow more and more complex, collaboration amongst founding teams, educators, and users becomes increasingly more important. It is from this collaborative intuition that we have seen some teams grow into flourishing communities with massive TVL, while other teams remain isolated in their niche. Although projects take a different approach, the intention is consistent across these communities - grow the ecosystem, add value, and onboard the masses.Today we talk to Kris Kay, aka DeFi Donut, who is firmly positioned as a prominent educational content creator in the DeFi space. There is tons to cover in DeFi and us content creators are just scratching the surface. In this one, Kris and the Slate team cover the DeFi content that is most in-demand and analyze how content is most digestible and entertaining while helping to grow your stack. Check out DeFi Donut's channel for demo videos and more on his DeFi journey.Enjoy!-RobP.S. We’ve just launched our DeFi Degen Community, think of it as an inner circle to getting in early and being on top of all things DeFi. DeFi literally changed my entire career path and life. Read about my story and how you can join us…Its starting to grow steadily…read about it here.It’s harvest season. Farm like a pro on mstable :)High-Yield Savings Account & Leverage Your Assets with Aave.Non-custodial money market protocol leading the #DeFi charge.🎙DeFi By Design EP #40: Uniting Content Creators in DeFi w Kris KayWatch on YouTube here:👀 Sponsor Update: DeGate is a Decentralized Layer 2 Decentralized Exchange based on optimistic rollups. DeGate will offer secure order-book trading that is faster and cheaper.Degate also offers a fast and efficient L1 - L2 Bridge, testnet is operating now. Try it HERE⚠️ DISCLAIMER: Investing into cryptocurrency and DeFi platforms comes with inherent risk including technical risk, human error, platform failure and more. At certain points throughout this post, we might get commission for promoting certain projects, if this is the case we will always make sure it is clear. We are strictly an educational content platform, nothing we offer is financial advice. We are not professionals or licensed advisors.Liked this post? Share with a friend :)🚀 Join Our Inner Circle And Become A Certified DeFi Degen!🌐Check Us Out On Twitter!🚀Join the community on Telegram Channel to get our free V.1. yield farming guide!🎤Subscribe to our YouTube channel!Last week in review:Tap In Tuesday: Driving Layer 2 Adoption w/ DeGate Bridge🎙DeFi By Design EP #39: The Power of DeFi in Unbanked Countries w/ Akin SawyerWiretap Wednesday: Bridging Layer 2 Chains for DeFi Summer 2.0 w/ DeGateCheck out some previous interviews:DeFi Slate x Nate Hindman: AMMs & Bancor V2DeFi Slate x TheEther: A social governance experience for EthereumDeFi Slate x Jeff Jihoz: Web 3.0 Gaming Axie InfinityDeFi Slate x Nick Fett: Oracles, Tellor, and the future of DeFiRecent tweets: Get on the email list at defislate.substack.com

Join Nate (Cryptonauts) and I as we invite Monty (Sienna Network) and our new crypto friend Gemmy to discuss the latest happenings and upcoming trends in the cryptocurrency space! Learn more about Sienna Network: https://sienna.network Check out Monty's podcast: https://blockspeak.io/ Cryptonauts YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/cryptonauts Follow Nate on Twitter: https://twitter.com/CryptonautsShow Follow Gemmy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/GemmyCrypto

Download the crypto meta to your brain in this weekly show. 4th Week of May, 2021 ------

Crypto Bull Run & DeFi Summer 2.0, Daily DeFi News. FREE 3 DAY PASS TO JOIN MY PRIVATE DISCORD GROUP (DeFi TRADING SIGNALS, YIELD FARMING STRATEGIES, PRESALES, & LOW CAP ALTCOINS) - Join My Private Chat and Signals Group: https://defitrader.memberful.com/join

This week we ranted on the current market conditions and our strategies moving into Defi Summer 2.0.Trade and buy crypto with FTX and support the show: ftx.us/#a=4000873Want video? Watch the podcast on YouTube.This episode is sponsored by Crypto Candies. Head on over to cryptocandies.io and check out their most recent designs.Connect with us:Twitter: @CryptoDojoPodInstagram: @CryptoDojoPodFacebook: Crypto DojoYouTube (for video of each podcast): Crypto DojoPodcast intro produced by: Case Arnold (IG: @StillCase)Audio production: Jeff Meloen (IG: @Jeff_Melo)

This week Anna (https://twitter.com/AnnaRRose) and Tarun (https://twitter.com/tarunchitra) chat with Andy Chorlian (https://twitter.com/andy8052). Andy recounts the many interesting moments through his crypto journey, including being at Maker during Black Thursday, living through DeFi Summer, and then jumping into NFTs with Top Shot and PleasrDAO. Taking a break from his degen career, Andy is now developing Fractional, a protocol for fractionalizing NFTs. He explains how it works under the hood and how the concept could bridge the DeFi and NFT worlds. Here are some links for this episode: An overview of the NBA Top Shot (https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/EthanLevy/20210412/379292/Three_Ways_the_NBA_Top_Shot_Economy_Could_Collapse.php) platform to understand what it’s about. Andy’s NBA Top Shot stats (https://livetoken.co/community-tools/account?address=9b20c779622c945b&mode=activities) page. The WSJ article (https://www.wsj.com/articles/nba-top-shot-nft-crypto-digital-collectibles-11615266042) featuring Andy’s “messy” desk. Where Media & Music Meet NFT & Blockchain, Zero Knowledge Episode 167 (https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/167) featuring Andre Anjos (RAC) and Trevor McFedries (Brud). An intro (https://medium.com/@fractional_art/what-is-fractional-dd4f86e6458a) to Fractional The Snowden NFT piece (https://foundation.app/Snowden/stay-free-edward-snowden-2021-24437) If you’re looking for a job in the world of blockchain and zero knowledge, don’t forget to check out our Jobs Board (https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/zkjobsboard)! The board is updated right after each Jobs Fair, the next one of which is today! Register here for the Jobs Fair (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe_plfJLa8IKoTzSkytgQkzzF4l4N4gaySVg9EBdlarI4-sKA/viewform) and here (https://hopin.com/events/zksessions-the-zk-languages-showdown) if you want to attend the zkSessions sister event. This will be our first zk-centric zkSessions for a full dive into DSLs and libraries for programming with ZKPs. Also, make sure to subscribe to our new Substack (https://zeroknowledge.substack.com) to be updated of any future zkSessions, Jobs Fair, StudyClub or another of our many initiatives. Thanks to this week’s sponsor, O1 Labs (https://o1labs.org), the creators of Mina Protocol Mina is the world’s lightest blockchain – powered by participants. Mina is a layer-one protocol, creating a private gateway between the real world and crypto. The entire chain is around 22kb — even as it scales, thanks to zk-SNARKs. The ecosystem is growing fast and Mina's mainnet has just gone live, offering users a platform to build a private gateway between the real world and crypto, visit minaprotocol.com (https://minaprotocol.com) to find out more. If you like what we do: Follow us on Twitter - @zeroknowledgefm (https://twitter.com/zeroknowledgefm) Join us on Telegram (https://t.me/joinchat/TORo7aknkYNLHmCM) Catch us on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYWsYz5cKw4wZ9Mpe4kuM_g) Read up on the r/ZKPodcast subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/zkpodcast) Give us feedback! -https://forms.gle/iKMSrVtcAn6BByH6A Support our Gitcoin Grant (https://gitcoin.co/grants/329/zero-knowledge-podcast-2) Support us on the ZKPatreon (https://www.patreon.com/zeroknowledge) Donate through coinbase.commerce (https://commerce.coinbase.com/checkout/f1e56274-c92b-4a99-802f-50727d651b38) Or directly here: ETH: 0xC0FFEE1B5083230a5154F55f253B6b6ae8F29B1a BTC: 1cafekGa3podM4fBxPSQc6RCEXQNTK8Zz ZEC: t1R2bujRF3Hzte9ALHpMJvY8t5kb9ut9SpQ

We bring back Denko Mancheski, CEO and Founder of Reef Finance ($REEF). Since our last interview, Reef Finance has vastly expanded its ecosystem with two brand new components, Reef Chain and ReefStarter. Reef Chain is an EVM compatible chain for DeFi built with Polkadot Substrate. It allows projects to build or port their existing DeFi applications onto the chain with only a few simple clicks and no modifications to the existing solidity code. Reef Chain allows projects to continue having all their usual features such as on-chain governance and staking. ReefStarter is an initial DEX offering (IDO) platform designed with simplicity in mind. ReefStarter will allow users to have smooth and efficient token swaps with very low gas fees. Thus making DeFi more accessible to all. Learn more about Reef Finance and Reef Chain: https://reef.finance/ Learn more about ReefStarter: https://medium.com/reef-finance/introduction-to-reefstarter-ido-platform-on-reef-chain-33e788583192 Medium: https://reefdefi.medium.com/Twitter: https://twitter.com/ReefDeFi

Welcome to Ledger Cast, hosted by me, Brian Krogsgard (@ledgerstatus on twitter), and Josh Olszewicz (@carpenoctom). Ledger Cast is a cryptocurrency trading and blockchain ecosystem podcast.You can subscribe to new episodes of Ledger Cast on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, YouTube and via RSS.The information in this podcast should not be construed as investment advice, it is purely educational material and you should always do your own research before buying.Find Josh and Brian elsewhereJosh’s articles on Brave New CoinJosh’s videos for BNC’s InsightsJosh’s YouTube channelJosh on Twitter @carpenoctomBrian on Twitter @ledgerstatusMusic: “Oh, the chains” by Joel Madison BlountPartner: MatchaWe’re happy to partner with Matcha, a simple way to trade on in a decentralized manner. Built by the team behind the 0x Protocol, Matcha makes it easy to interact with the top liquidity pools, with a curated list of top crypto assets, a seamless interface, and some of the best liquidity matching you can find. Try it today for your next DeFi trade.

Aave Is Setting Up To Have Another Nice DeFi Summer!! AAVE Coin Analysis - BlockFi - (Use Link Below To Get Up to $250 BTC When Depositing Just $25 or More) https://blockfi.mxuy67.net/c/2800288/907782/10568 --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/cryptopodcast/support

Another wave of DeFi summer in 2021? Crypto market predictions. Sign up for Token Metrics at https://tokenmetrics.com​ Token Metrics Media LLC is a regular publication of information, analysis and commentary focused especially on blockchain technology and business, cryptocurrency, blockchain-based tokens, market trends, and trading strategies. Like the podcast to let us know you like the content!

Another wave of DeFi summer in 2021? Crypto market predictions. Sign up for Token Metrics at https://tokenmetrics.com​ Token Metrics Media LLC is a regular publication of information, analysis and commentary focused especially on blockchain technology and business, cryptocurrency, blockchain-based tokens, market trends, and trading strategies. Like the podcast to let us know you like the content!

DEFITIMES