Podcasts about ethereum ico

The SEC approves trading for ETH ETFs. Superstate launches a crypto carry fund. Optimism announces Retro Funding Round 5. And today marks 10 years since the Ethereum ICO. Read more: https://ethdaily.io/511 Sponsor: Firefly is a one-stop Web3 social aggregator developed by Mask Network. Use one feed to connect with all users across Twitter, Lens, Farcaster, and all Web3 socials. Try it today at firefly.social.

In this episode, Ben sits down with Allan Cassis, Founder and CEO of LVNA Capital. Born and raised in Mexico City, Allan is a crypto OG and has been operating LVNA since 2017. Following early bets in Bitcoin and the Ethereum ICO, Allan currently operates a liquid and venture strategy that focuses on infrastructure and other pragmatic applications of blockchain and digital assets. Let's get into it. Connect with the guest LVNA https://lvnacapital.com/ Follow LVNA Capital on Twitter/X https://twitter.com/lvnacapital Disclaimer  Ben Jacobs is a partner at Scenius Capital Management. All views expressed by Ben and the guests of this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Scenius Capital Management. Guests and the host may maintain positions in the assets or funds discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

Today's blockchain and cryptocurrency news Bitcoin is up slightly at $30,008 Eth is down slightly at $1,908 XRP up slightly at 79 cents Societe Generale becomes first company to receive DASP license in France. U.S. authorities seize funds from Bahamas based Deltec G20 welcomes FSB recommendations for tougher rules on crypto asset activities.  Ethereum ICO whale moves trove. Republican lawmakers, Reps. French Hill and Dusty Johnson criticize Securities and Exchange Commission over crypto activities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's blockchain and cryptocurrency news Bitcoin is up slightly at $27,906 Eth is up slightly at $1,902 Binance Coin is up .5% at $315 Genesis and Gemini seek dismissal of SEC lawsuit Temasek penalizes staff over failed FTX investment Ethereum ICO wallet wakes up after 8 years FTM implements dApp Gas Monetization Program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Block199.io Interview For our very first guest podcast, Rantum spoke with ElBarto_crypto  a Dune wizard and crypto data scientist, working on research at Block119.io. Recently, he's researched and published on topics like NFT Hodler segmentation, airdrops, and NFT wash trading.  How to check if a collection is made of hodlers or flippers Check wash trading volume for collections & platforms What tools el_barto uses to use to analyze collections What topics he plans to research next   Rough Transcript   [00:00:00] Rantum: All right. Uh, here we are. I, this is ran. Andrew, here I am with our very first guest. We've talked about this on the, if you've listened for a little while, we've talked about this on the intro for a long time, that we would have guests, we've, uh, yet to actually do that and. Well, that's up until today. Uh, we've had, uh, we have a data sign, another data scientist joining us today. [00:01:06] He actually reached out his Alberto Crypto as he goes by on Twitter. On Twitter. He reached out, uh, and asked to, to be a guest on the podcast. And, you know, I, I felt like we really needed to, to actually do it. So here we are. Welcome to the show, El Baro Crypto . [00:01:24] Elbarto Crypto: Gne. Well, thanks for having me. I've realized in life if you just asked people enough, they either get sick of you or they let you do something. [00:01:30] So in this case, I'm glad to be the latter. [00:01:33] Rantum: Yeah, yeah. Really excited to actually do this. You know, it's a good needy, you know, little instigator to, to make it happen. . Perfect. I love it. So tell me a little bit about yourself. How'd you get where you are? How'd you get into crypto? [00:01:48] Elbarto Crypto: Yeah, so I am actually a data scientist by trade. [00:01:51] I worked in marketing analytics for probably a little longer than a decade, doing everything from segmentation, machine learning just writing basic SQL queries. Got to spend a lot of time doing customer analytics for very large brands, uh, in the marketing space and. Sort of caught the Bitcoin bug in like end of 2014 ish and you couldn't do really anything at that point. [00:02:17] You could just send Bitcoin to each other and that was, that was fun. . And then yeah, Ethereum ICO came. Um, once again, people still just, you know, sending Ether around, maybe trading on XX Ether Delta, these crazy, um, underground exchanges. Uh, but once for, for a while, you know, really the only thing you could do is, is not get caught up in a scam or an ICO scam. [00:02:39] And then, uh, right around 2019, I believe it was, um, dune Analytics launched and that was like sort of. . That was sort of like the great equalizer for data scientists because now all of a sudden you have this platform that you could tap into to query the blockchain, you know, for free, honestly. And that was like the, the most beautiful thing. [00:02:58] You could just easily share careers with people, share dashboards with people. Then this Analytics community, sort of, joined around that. And then other products like SEN launched, um, flip side crypto, a lot of these, you know, data open blockchain on, on BigQuery. And so now all of a sudden you, you know, you didn't have to worry about data engineering running your own validator, running your own node. [00:03:18] You could just. Query data and you build, you know, beautiful data sets. And, uh, I think a lot of things like in the marketing analytics background, definitely applied to crypto just in terms of, you know, user retention who's actually using products, machine learning, things like that. So yeah, absolutely. [00:03:34] It's been a very natural transition to, uh, to analyzing data. And now, uh, now. It's gotten crazy. analyze a lot of data on Yeah. Yeah. , it's, it's a lot of fun though. Meet a lot of the people like yourself. So, yeah, [00:03:46] Rantum: similar background. I was, I did a lot in, in e-commerce, analytics, marketing, uh, for this and, you know, fem way into crypto. [00:03:53] And, and it's, it's, it's really exciting having access to all of the, the data as opposed to, you know, just what the, uh, the one company that you're working with, uh, provides. Right. [00:04:03] Elbarto Crypto: Yeah. I mean, that's such a good. Like I, I think people don't realize like how special this data set is if you go work for you know, like a big enterprise company, even as a data scientist, like, well one, like you probably don't get access to data right away. [00:04:17] You probably have to get approved. You have to, you know, build the trust of people to start analyzing data. Um, here from day one, you know, it's, it's open right here. You can even, I think Google BigQuery even gives you $300 free. Uh, so you can just tap in immediately and. Securing data. It's really, uh, it's really amazing. [00:04:35] Rantum: Yeah. Yeah. How did you. , what was, what did you get started with when you started on Dune? I mean, you saw that it was available, there's free data. What, what were the first projects that you got interested [00:04:46] Elbarto Crypto: in? Yeah, so the first thing was just really looking at like what, who's using, uh, who's using the platform? [00:04:52] And as many, many people know, my dog who's in the background, he's, uh, he's, he's running from farm to farm is what he's doing. Uh, many people, uh, I think at first it was just creating, you know, The raw blockchain data itself to really like, understand what's going on. I think, I think one of the biggest problems people face is there is this open data set, but immediately they, um, get inundated with these, uh, very specific contract calls and they have to, um, decode data and all of a sudden you're dealing with OS and hashes. [00:05:25] And I think at first people get really like overwhelmed. And I remember looking. , um, dune for the first time and just seeing all these contract abstractions, like, I think it, it must have started with Ave back then, but just thinking like, what is going on here? Like how this is, this seems impossible. So I think it definitely takes a lot of patience, but at first it was just, you know, how many people are using the Ethereum blockchain? [00:05:47] You know how many people a day are using it? How many people used it last month and now are using it this month again? So it was really, for me, it was really just basic before, um, really diving into like more more of the abstractions around like ave and then compound and really seeing that lending side and then really just trying to visualize like who's making big D trades, you know, just very basic, like, hey, just let's just sort dex trades by u SD volume and like, let's just see who's buying things. [00:06:14] So I think like, yeah, at first it was like super basic because honestly it, it's very overwhelming when you first look at it. Yeah, absolutely. [00:06:20] Rantum: I mean, having all of the data available is, is great. And it's also overwhelming, right? Having all the choices. Exactly. [00:06:29] Elbarto Crypto: Everything's thrown at you at once. It's uh, yeah, it's a lot of our. [00:06:34] Rantum: How did you, you know, or 2019 it was, you know, a lot of D trades, you know, then we got into, you know, the kind of defi after that and then, you know, saw, you know, NFTs come, you know, big in, you know, in 2021. I, you know, it's is when it was, you know, really took off. How did you, uh, What, what did, how did you start working with the N F T data? [00:06:56] Um, and how'd you find that different than working with some of the, uh, the early token data? Yeah, [00:07:01] Elbarto Crypto: I like, the reason I like N F T data a lot is because, um, the same token, i e d and the same, um, the transfers across trade. So I think one of the biggest problems you have with Dex trades and analyzing like defi data, , um, people can immediately go anonymous. [00:07:19] Like, if I make huge Dex trade I can then just go back into Binance or just send my phones back on a Coinbase or and then it just becomes like an, an empty hole. Like, well, what happens with that person? What happens with that token? But for n n T data, since it's all on chain and you can't really, and each token is, is essentially a, a unique token, it really lends to some interesting analytics around. [00:07:42] how long people hold NFTs. So I think that's what one of the things that drew me to it was, it's understanding the nuances are obviously like very complicated, like with lost shells, which we'll probably talk about later. But from the very beginning, it made sense to me that like ID one is always ID one and it always corresponds to the ID one. [00:08:03] So it, it really lends to some beautiful, like long-term a. , um, with NFT [00:08:08] Rantum: drill. Yeah. That, that non, that non fungible aspect really takes exactly [00:08:12] Elbarto Crypto: way, right, . Yeah, exactly. I think people take, I, I think, I think people don't realize like how unique that is. Uh, and definitely allows for, for interesting transac for interesting analysis. [00:08:22] Rantum: Yeah. I mean, I, I've definitely found that interesting. When you look at NFT collections, I mean, you can't look at trades as, you can't look at every trade as the same. I mean, there are. oftentimes reasons that things are trading at, at much, maybe something significantly higher than the floor. You know, sometimes there aren't, and you know, we know there's a lot of wash trading out there. [00:08:42] Um, have you found that, have you found that aspect difficult to decipher, you know, what is real versus, uh, sort of the wash trade or how much do you [00:08:52] Elbarto Crypto: Yeah. Uh, shout out to Hilda today for, for introducing a new, uh, uh, wash trading flag. So at first, like I remember this is like really dating myself. So like, well let's, you know, starting with like the looks rare, um, that was like when, when people first like, oh man, yeah, that, um, wash trade concept of like, hey, volume is exploding, but in reality like people are just nibis and terraforms. [00:09:19] Yeah, exactly. So I think it's like, yeah, I think it. It's so interesting because you, you, you can do very basic, you can do very good analytics, just the basic, you know, SQL group buy statements, and this is, this is Data Pod Science podcast. We'll just go right into and nerding it out. But you can do very like, easy analytics with, you know, group buy day, you know, what's the volume of n ft sales? [00:09:41] And I think a lot of a lot of mainstream publications like to just look at like, okay, um, volume is down 80. . But in reality, like it's obviously much more different than that. So, we now know that, uh, a lot of volume all looks rare was really just people farming will look for a token just mindlessly trading tokens. [00:09:57] And so from there it, you know, it'll, it, it forced people to sort of think a little deeper in terms of, you know, a trade is not just a trade and you know, what is an actual wash sale trade or and now I think. . It's interesting because blur almost, it, it forces you to rethink about analytics once again, because we know like what a, a wash trade is now. [00:10:18] But now there's like these very interesting, um, analytics going on about people, you know. Taking this one step further and doing all sorts of crazy placing orders like slightly above the floor price when they not be a wash sale or maybe swapping out NFTs. So like let's say if you own a board ape and you just want to farm, you don't really care what ape you own and you just kind of wanna farm the the blur sale, you can sort of just. [00:10:42] Sell eight, buy another one, sell that one, buy another one. You're not really changing anything. Even taking slate laws [00:10:48] Rantum: to Exactly, yeah. Of the blurred to eventual, blurred [00:10:51] Elbarto Crypto: token . Exactly. In the hopes of getting a $50,000 airdrop. Uh, so it's interesting now, like, as these N F T models evolve for, for revenue for these exchanges, like then doing the due diligence of analytics to, to figuring out, you know, what's. [00:11:09] Rantum: Yeah, it, it's, you know, we see these incentives and, I mean, we've seen all these, uh, sort of vampire attacks on open sea and different ways to try to maybe disincentivize people from gaming, the systems, and it seems like. Collectors or, you know, maybe not, and maybe those, I shouldn't really call those people the collectors. [00:11:28] These are the, the people out there. There's somebody that's going to figure out how to, to make the most of the system. And, you know, it's, it's a tough one when you to, to, to look ahead and realize what people are going to [00:11:38] Elbarto Crypto: do, . Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And I think it's, it, it's, I don't wanna say it's fa as an analytics person, but like it definitely makes you think, and it definitely challenges you to say, , how can I use data to, to understand what, what's really going [00:11:53] Rantum: on? [00:11:55] Yeah. I mean, it, it is, I mean, all of these different crypto charts, there's always, you know, looks all steady until there's a serious inflection point and something drastic changes. And, and you see this all the time. I mean, you know, and in just the volume that you see among opens sea and blur and, and looks rare and, you know, you, you sort of need to know the story behind why these, these things are changing so drastically. [00:12:17] Elbarto Crypto: Yeah, exactly. And I think that makes you a better analytics person too. Like I, you know, if, if you're looking at break into this sector, and you know, like on job interviews and things like that. Like definitely bringing up points of like, well, why do you think um, hey, this data looks like the way it is. Is it sustainable? [00:12:33] Exactly to your point. Like, is it sustainable? Like, what's really going on here? I think, do you really have a ability to differentiate, like in this space, if you can bring these, you know, differentiated analytics. So can you tell me [00:12:46] Rantum: a little bit about block 1 99 and then the N F T Hudler segmentation that you've been working? [00:12:53] Elbarto Crypto: Yeah. So, um, we are essentially just a research firm. Uh, we do research for, you know, individuals for protocols, uh, all across the stack. And so a while back someone was essentially wanted to understand, you know, what, you know, how people, how different N F T projects are and what their users look like. [00:13:15] So for example, like if you have an N F T project where. , most of the holders are people that you know, are these larger whales? Maybe just like trading in and out of things, you know, what does the long-term engagement really look like versus an N F T project where a lot of people. we're in it from the beginning. [00:13:37] And, um, they're true loyalists like of a project. And so what they were trying to understand was, you know, should I, you know, invest in this N F T project because are are the people that are really long term holders. So the way to do that, and, and it's really a, a beauty of the blockchain is you, you can, uh, you can essentially just take all the holders of a certain n ft collection and then you. [00:14:02] uh, count how many NFTs they own. Some the amount of volume that's been spent look at, you know, are they how much wash sales have they done? How many floor sweeps have they done? So you essentially have this data frame of, you know, the 10, you know, the 5,000 holders and, you know, what's all their N F T activity. [00:14:19] From there, you can just like run a kme segmentation to find these different, um, groups of, of people and then figure out like, okay, well what is their activity in the entire N F T space? So if you see that, you know, 90% of the holders, you know, on average holding N F T collection for 20 days, or are the, you know, top 10% of traders on X two, Y two, you may think twice about buying that FT collection because, you know, people are just flipping it for the sake [00:14:47] Rantum: of Flipp. [00:14:48] Right. Right. And so when you're looking at these, the activity, you're looking at activity from all [00:14:55] Elbarto Crypto: NFTs, [00:14:56] Rantum: that, that may have ha uh, been passed through this wallet. You're not looking at necessarily that specific collection. Right, [00:15:01] Elbarto Crypto: exactly. Yeah. And I think like, you, you know, you can, you can almost sort of like then do this matrix if you will. [00:15:08] Like, you could segment, um, just like current activity and then sort of like create this matrix of like Yeah. All other n ft activity to get really, like, dive into. How the users play out. But ideally, like what you're looking for and in the case of this person that they were looking for was, they wanted to see that people who are like true contributors to the N F T community or they had like strong holdings and like what would held on, would hold on a lot. [00:15:32] think like some good examples of that are like, if you look at pudgy penguins, um, shout out to the, to the poo group. Um, a lot of them have, if you, you just look at simple like distributions of how long they've been the project for. Like a lot of them, um, have held since the beginning almost. And so you kind of look at that community and say like, okay, is that's something that I wanna do for the long term. [00:15:54] and the price. And, you know, the price has done pretty well. They had on a recent mini surge this, um, past couple of weeks. But it makes sense because, you know, just the supply of, of poos to hit the market is if no one's selling, it's always going down the, the number, the amount of supply that's hitting the market. [00:16:11] So, um, it makes sense that, you know, eventually, uh, Prices price go up. So Right. Versus, uh, versus like, you see [00:16:20] Rantum: the sustained interest, I guess is, is something that it's a little hard to measure from inactivity, but if they're not, if they're not dumping, there is something there. Right. . Yeah, exactly. [00:16:30] Elbarto Crypto: And I think that's the, that's like the holy grail of NFT engagement is how do you measure engagement of, of the nons sellers. [00:16:37] Because right now I, you know, Like volume does not equal engagement. If someone is selling their N F T, they're the least engaged with the brand. [00:16:45] Rantum: Right, right. Volume is is a very poor measure of, of the quality of a [00:16:50] Elbarto Crypto: project. Exactly. I, the problem is like unfortunately, like we don't have another way to, to do this. [00:16:55] And I think like the ways so far, it's interesting looking at the, the board ape ecosystem and, and, and maybe you can see. , you know, how many people are participating in governance or how many, you know, a polls also hold ape coin. But, you know, getting outside of the blockchain, you know, engagement becomes a much more interesting thing. [00:17:18] I think the evolution of NFTs should be some sort of like, loyalty, you know, coming back to the marketing world, you know, some sort of like marketing, uh, you know, CRM engagement platform where you can engage like outside of the blockchain. . Uh, so it's, it's, it's definitely in its ancy. And I think I'll, I think, I think NFT brands that are, are data first and are looking to expand their analytics capability are definitely gonna do better. [00:17:43] Rantum: Yeah. It feels like there's just a lot not being used. I mean, you can obviously find out so much about your, your holders and what their interests are just by looking at the wallet, and I don't think that's being, being used by many, uh, project creators or uh, leaders at this point. [00:17:59] Elbarto Crypto: Oh yeah, absolutely agree. [00:18:01] Rantum: Um, so you've developed something called an nf or you're working on something called an N F D D Gen Score. Can you just tell me a little bit about that? [00:18:08] Elbarto Crypto: Yeah, so I'm looking for someone to take this over actually. So DM me because I'm going out on crypto paternity leave soon. But essentially, uh, there's something called the defi, um, D Degen score, or it's just, I think it's just called DEGEN score. [00:18:23] um, your defi activity, right? And I, I want to build, I'm in the process of building, haven't built yet. Sort of like this N F T engagement or D gen score of, okay, how many you know, how many projects do you hold? How many mints have you done? How many, how many trades have you placed? Um, the idea here is more along the lines of it's almost like a segmentation, but. [00:18:46] if you're an N F T project, that's going to whitelist some you know, whitelist or project for certain holders or addresses. It would be nice if you had an idea of, of, you know, who would you want to whitelist this for? And like, do you wanna exclude certain groups? Do you wanna include only people with above a certain score or, you know, have had certain engagement? [00:19:06] So I think it's like really meant for, you know, hopefully for projects to better understand. , Hey, let's, you know, make this let's make this white list. Like for people that really care about NFTs or like people that aren't just gonna like immediately dump, um, these NFTs. So there's a lot of ways you can do this. [00:19:24] I, I would want to almost optimize this for like, engagement with NFTs instead of just like farming to dump. But I think that's where the hard part comes in. [00:19:36] Rantum: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think we're seeing, I mean, we're so sort of a misalignment, so many places of, you know, where are the, you know, what is activity and, you know, what, where is the, you know, where are the royalties coming from? [00:19:46] When you're thinking about all these, uh, these different issues, it seems like we come back to the same thing. The people that are are selling are the ones that are co, I mean, you know, obviously a, a cell requires a buy, but that's when the, the income comes into a project. When. Ideally you just want nobody to, to really wanna sell. [00:20:05] Right? And [00:20:05] Elbarto Crypto: yes. Yes, [00:20:07] Rantum: exactly. How do you, I don't know. I'm not, you know, I see that one, I know that one of the projects that you wanna work on is, uh, trying to calculate the royalty income and, you know, do you see that as being a sustainable model going forward? [00:20:21] Elbarto Crypto: I, you know, I'm very mixed on this because I used to think, like, I used to want projects. [00:20:26] I used to really like the royalty initiative because I think it is fair in some sense. . I think if we were to eliminate royalties like tomorrow, I think they would force N F T brands to start thinking of like alternative business models because yeah, like as we said over and over again, like the royalty optimizes towards people selling. [00:20:47] In reality, it should be the complete flip of that. Like the most engaged people, like across every brand, the most engaged people with the brand are the ones like creating the revenue for you. I, while I, I don't know exactly where I fall in the royalty space right now. I, I, you know, it's not, luckily it's not my job to do that. [00:21:07] Yeah, right. . But I think that like, it would force n f T brands to think of new revenue streams that I only think will help them. Because right now royalties are obviously limited to people that are buying and selling NFTs. And the goal is to. a brand. Just a brand in general, right? Like when you think about Ferrari, like everyone knows Ferrari. [00:21:30] Their, their brand recognition is beyond anything. They, I, I was surprised though. I was looking at their, their income statement and they, the majority of their money, they still make off of selling cars, selling parts, et cetera. I think only like 15% of their revenue comes from like merchandising and things like that. [00:21:46] For an N F T brand, that should be the opposite. It, in my opinion, like 15% should come from royalties and then 85% should come from some other I don't know what that is. Hopefully someone smarter than they can figure that out, but yeah. Yeah, it's [00:21:58] Rantum: tough to say what that is because they're, you know, as collectors. [00:22:02] I, I think people expect to get something from that. Mm-hmm. . And as we've seen recently with the, uh, artifact uh, Nike, uh, project, you know, people are not terribly happy when the, the, the next part was the ability to buy something and, you know, maybe a discount. So, you know, I think that still has to be worked out and I'm, I'm curious where that does go. [00:22:23] Yeah, I'm not , I'm not exactly sure where I fall overall, you know, I'm very pro royalty. Artist, but I think that's a very different thing than, than these 10,000 piece collections. You know, when I think of art, you know, I'm thinking of small collections or, or even one of one. I see that as being a sustainable model going forward. [00:22:41] Very different than, you know, 5,000 or 10,000 because you've always got other people that are, I mean, it becomes a bigger issue for the liquidity of a project when you've got a five or 10%, um, royalty, uh, fee built in. [00:22:54] Elbarto Crypto: Oh yeah, absolutely. Like the art box, when you have only have 200 of them, you would hope, yeah, you would hope that some sort of wallet royalty, right? [00:23:01] Yeah. But um, it's also, yeah, like when people expect something, it's like they, they don't understand like the, the basic like lifetime value, the customer acquisition cost ratio, which is, which is completely flipped now because if I buy a doodle right now, uh, doodle will get, you know, whatever the 3% of. [00:23:24] $6,000 sale. So let's call it $180. Like great. Uh, yeah. That, that's tough for them. . Yeah. Yeah. To give me more, uh, to give me, I, yeah. I think people definitely expect $180 more of stuff. And I know, I hear, I hear doodle putt was really fun, but. . [00:23:44] Rantum: Yeah. I didn't make it over there. I was, I was down in Miami and I did not get to go to that. [00:23:48] Elbarto Crypto: Unfortunately. , I'm sure, uh, I'm sure many of the doodle holders though are, are, uh, negative. Uh, yeah. So that's like one of the issues, right? Like if you become a doodle holder, you expect the world, but like the, the economics just don't work yet. Hopefully they do in the future, but Yeah. Or like, I mean, I think this, like, I think this introduces like new. [00:24:10] New forms of business. Like if, if doodles were to, you know, create these events, but like you could lend your N F t to somebody to go, or you know, that they would pay a fee and like lend a doodle or something like that. I think like there could be interesting innovation there. It's just. [00:24:28] Rantum: Yeah, it is, it does feel like it's still to be determined how, how to really structure these for, for a longer term. [00:24:35] You know, it, it reminds me a bit of. Just as you saw advertising in, you know, online advertising, it got more and more expensive and, you know, there's more promotions and, and things to get people to come and, and click. And, you know, you're talking about the, the lifetime acquisition. You know, it went from early on when you were advertising on, on Google, you know, you could make. [00:24:54] You know, you could even maybe make a profit on, on a sale or something. And then it turned into a longer and longer lifetime and you just saw that the cost go up as it sort of got inflated. And, you know, I think Barta that was maybe, you know, there was obviously more money being spent and you saw that there was a lot of, a lot of venture capital coming in. [00:25:12] Um, I'm wondering like how that's going to start affecting. , you know, these rewards and everything. You know, if it's going to be, you know, in, I mean, I assume that it's going to get redistributed, they're like less middle men. You know, you can, it's being given directly and, you know, it's hard to recognize what is, what's, what's real versus, you know, what's sort of artificially pumped in [00:25:32] Elbarto Crypto: Yeah, absolutely. I, yeah, and it'll probably take another year to play out to see what these, yeah. What this looks like. But, [00:25:38] Rantum: um, what else are you, uh, excited about? Right. . [00:25:40] Elbarto Crypto: I think definitely like the more of the in-person experiences, um, within the NFT space. I think like I, I, I am glad everyone is mad at like Live Nation and Ticketmaster right now because I, I hope that, uh, I hope that somehow the N F T space, uh, can solve for that somehow. [00:25:59] Uh, like I'm a big fan of India Top Shot. I, the product is beautiful. It's just a, it's a great experience, but you know, like as a, as a, as a top shot, like minnow, not quite a plankton, I'll, I'll call myself a minnow. Uh, you know, I'm definitely looking for that, like further engagement of like, with, you know, with the team that I like or with the player that I like. [00:26:22] Like how, how does that like work and, and, and sort of like what's the next step for them. Certainly looking for, you know, forward to that. And then I think like on like the zuki uh, collection, you know, I. , I kind of wanna see. They have great, like website. They have a great website right now. I think they're, you know, they're branding. [00:26:40] It's really on spot. I'm, I'm really a [00:26:42] Rantum: lot with, uh, with, with wearables as well, right? Yeah, [00:26:45] Elbarto Crypto: exactly. Like I saw, I, I, I was just like walking around, uh, where I lived the other day and someone was wearing, wearing a, um, a Bathing Ape shirt and I'm like, I'm like, oh man, I, I'm kind of like, I'm hoping like bored ape supplements that, or something like that. [00:26:58] So I'm definitely looking for these like real world experiences, like the bridge between the two and then, yeah, like in like the new innovations of, of business models for these, uh, and like when, you know, when everything will just airdrop, you know, that's what I'm looking for. . [00:27:13] Rantum: Yeah. Right. Air when Airdrop [00:27:14] Yeah. When [00:27:15] Elbarto Crypto: airdrop, I'm just gonna mask token. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Just one day, just give it all to me, you know? Right. Yeah. [00:27:21] Rantum: That would be, those were nice back, back when those were just coming out every couple weeks. Right. it, it was nice. Yeah, it was [00:27:28] Elbarto Crypto: nice. Uh, have [00:27:30] Rantum: you been to, uh, many in-person events or have you gotten to get to. [00:27:33] Elbarto Crypto: I, you know, it's funny, before the pandemic I used to go to a lot and I tell this funny story of, um, I went to a, this is like really gonna show my age. I went to a Dere meetup which is, for those who don't know, is, uh, is a, a Bitcoin esque product. And, um, , they, the where I went, they ordered, um, they ordered 10 pizzas, but only eight people went to the event. [00:27:57] So, uh, that just kind of shows you like how, uh, popular crypto was in [00:28:03] Rantum: 2018. [00:28:05] Elbarto Crypto: I wanna say. This was, um, I bet they didn't pay for the pizza with Bitcoin anyway. No, they, no, they did not. Uh, they used good old Uncle Sam dollars. So it's. It's really interesting to see like how how far things have come. And, and I was, uh, I went to an event, like a coup, a pretty small event, um, about a couple months ago. [00:28:25] And, um, it's good to see the energy back with people. Um, I like to see that. I, I, uh, I think I'm gonna make a huge, you know, I'm, I think I'm gonna make a splash next year by trying to go to some of these places, but, um, it seems like, uh, it seems like, yeah, there's good energy there. . Uh, yeah, [00:28:42] Rantum: I've enjoyed getting out to some events. [00:28:44] Just was at Basl as I, as I mentioned, and, uh, hoping to get to N ft N YC again, uh, this coming year. They seem to just, uh, make, make it difficult and move the month every , every event, . Um, lovely. So you can't really, you can never predict it, but , did you say anything? [00:29:01] Elbarto Crypto: Was there any interesting activations at, at Basil? [00:29:05] Uh, [00:29:06] Rantum: so NFT now had a big. Two blocks are so. Just for their own event. But then they had different booths within there where art blocks was there and Meta mask was there. And, uh, nine dcc, uh, which I talked about, um, recently, they had a min a shirt there, a one of 1200 was a snow fro. Oh. Uh, inspired art on this shirt. [00:29:32] So they worked with him on that. So there were some, there were some definitely cool, uh, N F T events. Um, you know, it was a little quieter in the N F T areas than, than maybe I I expected, uh, compared to, compared to something like, I mean, N F T NYC is just, it's, it's pretty big, you know? I know there's. [00:29:49] There's some complaints about, uh, the event. And, and I would also say that you don't necessarily have to go to, to the official event to, uh, to find many things to do. I mean, that's, that's, that's definitely the case at Basel, you know, where it's very unofficial. It's part of ma maybe it's part of Miami Art Week. [00:30:05] I'm not sure if it's technically even, even that. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right, right. But yeah, the in-person events I think are great. You know, I think people are still kind of getting out and I think part of, you know, even the, the fashion things, it's part of kind of bringing. Off the screen, off the, you know, off the computer and making it a little bit more real [00:30:23] Right. Exactly. [00:30:25] Elbarto Crypto: Step away from farming. It'll be, you'll be okay. You don't have to get all of them. [00:30:29] Rantum: Yeah. Right. , So you have, you have some new dashboards coming soon, but you are, you're well right now. It sounds like you are, uh, paternity leave. Huh? [00:30:38] Elbarto Crypto: trying to figure out how to make, how to do a swaddle. Yeah. So, oh man. Yeah, [00:30:42] Rantum: I remember that one. . [00:30:44] Elbarto Crypto: Yeah. Any need tips? Let me know. Yeah, I mean, I'm always looking on, you know, always looking for new data. [00:30:48] Um, always trying to build, you know, Data dashboards really to help people understand, you know, how data's being surfaced. You know, I've got a lot of like, you know, research projects on the back burner. Really trying, really, like trying to go after this question of like N F T engagement and you know, what kind of, who will be around for the long haul. [00:31:07] And then really, I am very curious about this defi N F T overlap. I, I think there's very, you know, I think the two are very separate right now, and I think people just assume by building a, a lending NFT platform that everyone will just come, you know, no questions asked. But in reality, the reason people got into NFTs is not because. [00:31:33] they're also excited about uncollateralized lending. Like they don't know what any of those words mean. And frankly, I don't think , I [00:31:40] Rantum: don't think anyone. Right. Yeah, that's good. Good [00:31:42] Elbarto Crypto: point. Yeah. So I, I, but then at the other hand, like on the other hand, I, I think, you know, if you have a board ape, you know, if you did get lucky and held on for all this time and you're sitting on, you know, $70,000, , it would be nice, you know, to realize some of these profits or, you know, maybe you have a dog who's going off to college and, and you need to pay tuition. [00:32:07] Uh, you know, it would be nice to realize maybe the little, these profits, um, yeah, [00:32:11] Rantum: right. For fractional [00:32:12] Elbarto Crypto: ownership. So I think it's definitely an un, an untapped area. I, I don't know how it'll work though in terms of UI and, and execut. [00:32:21] Rantum: what, uh, what, what, what have you been active with in what, in your wallet Recently? [00:32:27] Elbarto Crypto: What has been my wallet? I, you know, I'm like a, a real, a real defi, uh, degen. Uh, recently I've been, uh, I've been, I was like really bad farms that I've been going into. It's, uh, it's pretty sad. I, I've been trying to figure out recently, you know, some of these like NFT projects that have really gotten sold off. [00:32:47] there's a lot of work going behind the scenes. So like Rumble Kongs, for example. Um, this was like a project that really, you know, had a lot of hype. Um, so I own a couple Rumble Kongs in, in full transparency. This is a project that got a lot of hype. I think Steph Curry was wearing a Rumble Kong hat at some point. [00:33:04] Okay. ? Yeah. And like they have people working on it behind the scenes. You know, there are, there are truly people working. They are alive. Um, they are, you know, programming. I'm, I'm gonna check, I'm gonna check the floor [00:33:15] Rantum: price right now. Here's mine. And the ones that are, they're still busy and haven't left. [00:33:20] I mean, we know that a lot of these are going, they're going to zero. And, um, it is. You know, finding the ones that are still busy and gonna keep building through, you know, through the bear. That's, that's, uh, it's key if you can find them . [00:33:34] Elbarto Crypto: Right, exactly. So, yeah, you know, I'm kind of looking at that area a little bit. [00:33:38] I've been trying to like, you know, look at more like these illiquid art blocks, collections. Yeah, . I just don't know right now like what the best way. I don't know what the best way to display them or engage with like other people or like really engage with the artists is yet. So I'm still trying to like, I also just don't want to get ripped off by like buying, you know, something for like four E and then being like, what have I done, like [00:34:02] Rantum: immediately? [00:34:02] Right. But I mean, there's some, there are some very pricey, very illiquid pieces in, uh, in our blocks. You know, there's definitely some, some grape buys. Uh, can be difficult to tell the difference. And, you know, that that's the beauty of NFTs, right? , yeah, exactly. [00:34:18] Elbarto Crypto: Um, you know, I, I respect what the pudgy team is doing. [00:34:20] Uh, I don't own any poos maybe, you know? Yeah. [00:34:24] Rantum: That is impressive. They're, they're the strength of the holders. The D Gen score is high, huh? Absolutely. [00:34:29] Elbarto Crypto: Yeah. And they're really, uh, they're really executing there. So, um, you know, shout out to the team there for. Putting something good together. So yeah, that's like, I've been really trying to think about like, you know, what projects are still actively being worked on and, and sort of like, can you scoop up any, any good values? [00:34:46] Uh, yeah. And like, you have to like what it is, right? I mean, like, I don't, like if I buy something I, you know, honestly, like I don't wanna sell it. I, I, uh, You know, I'll just hold on [00:34:55] forever. [00:34:56] Rantum: That's the best way, right? Just by what you, what you actually want to own . [00:34:59] Elbarto Crypto: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That way if it goes zero, you feel a little less bad. [00:35:04] So [00:35:04] Rantum: yeah. Hey, we all have at least a few of those, right? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Awesome. Uh, so where can people find you and, uh, [00:35:12] Elbarto Crypto: You. Yeah. You can find a very inactive crypto account starting today at El barto underscore crypto on Twitter. Uh, I'll be back in February. Don't worry. [00:35:22] Rantum: You do have a list of, uh, research for I, you know, people will wanna get some homework. [00:35:25] There's, there's some . [00:35:27] Elbarto Crypto: Yeah. If you feel like you have nothing to do over the, over the break and, uh, you wanna. do some NFT research. I have plenty of projects for people to hand out. So Is the baby here already? No. No. It, it's coming soon. Yeah. All right. Well, [00:35:42] Rantum: so very exciting. That's awesome. Um, anything else you wanna add before we sign off here? [00:35:47] Elbarto Crypto: You know, I would add if anyone has any advice on having a bo a dog stop barking in a shadow, like please reach out to me because, uh, it's been a, a constant thorn on my side. He's a great, he's a great pal and a great farmer, so welcome to you. [00:36:01] Rantum: That shadow's throwing him. Awesome. Well, thank you so much Alberto Crypto. [00:36:04] This is awesome. First interview. Uh, very excited, and we'll have to talk again soon. [00:36:10] Elbarto Crypto: Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. All right.  

This week on The Defiant Podcast, we speak with Sam Williams, the co-founder and CEO of Arweave, a 'collectively owned hard drive' that enables users to store data, applications, and documents on-chain, forever. We start by learning about Sam's crypto journey, from discovering Bitcoin in 2010 and going on to invest in the Ethereum ICO and finally, starting Arweave. Sam thinks we're seeing a renewed focus on decentralization as the debate over censoring transactions continues. He believes it's essential to keep a neutral historical record that future generations can learn from. We go on to dive into the varied use cases of Arweave, what Sam says to those that say Arweave might be too expensive to store certain files, how Arweave is used to store NFTs so that they can live forever, and how you can earn money with Arweave. Thanking our podcast sponsors: Built by the team behind Avalanche, Core is an all-in-one command center for Web3 supporting Avalanche, Ethereum, and Bitcoin, a rich ecosystem of dApps, Bitcoin & Ethereum bridges, NFTs, Subnets, and more. Visit core.app to download now. Minima is a new mobile-native layer 1 blockchain. Join over 400,000 node runners on Minima's Incentive Program, to start earning $MINIMA every day until Mainnet launch. Get started at minima.global/get-involved Railway is the first DeFi wallet to integrate the powerful RAILGUN privacy system built using zero-knowledge cryptography and available on Ethereum, BSC, and Polygon.

Is Bitcoin really our only option? Mandana gets curious why so many different crypto currencies keep popping up and Ian explains how so many projects have successfully pulled off the scam. Recommended Apps Strike CashApp Credit Cards BlockFi Books The Bitcoin Standard

Why did you start Zilliqa? So Well, well, the main reason why we started Zilliqa was based on this idea of sharding. Because he felt that this was an idea that we started as a first academic paper. So that was the first paper that was published in the academic literature that basically showed two people that you could actually apply this idea of sharding in the public blockchain. So until then, it was not known or it was not well formally studied how to do that in practice. So one, one very key sort of idea that we started now with something that many people are following. Or you know, whether it be I won't say Ethereum ICO followed us. But definitely, we started that chain reaction where now, several teams that are actually pursuing that idea of sharding, may different forms and shapes, some are obviously trying to improve on what we have done. So that's, that's something that hopefully, obviously gives us an advantage on what we started with. The second area that we tried to focus on was around smart contract safety is something again, that many people are doing but in our approach has been outside perimeter, the first or second one, in that sense, where we felt that the language, smart contract language, the way it was designed, specially solidity was sort of designed with, you know, developer features in mind, not so much on security aspects of it. And what ended up happening was that it became so loose or became so open, for people to use that it became very difficult to make sure that any formal guarantees could be, could come off. And of course, you know, it's not impossible, but it's very, very difficult. And if you change the language, or if you restrict the language in some way, it becomes much easier. So basically, what we have learned so far is that you basically have a trade-off between how expressive a language can be and how auditable that language could be. So how easy it is to reason about the correctness and safety of that contract. And that's it for today if you look at a recent survey made by I think sorority team, one of the most hated, I mean, it's one of the most most loved aspects as well, is that 30 is most one of the most hated aspect of it is that it's very close to JavaScript. Even though, even though it definitely makes people who actually develop web applications, so they like it much easier. And that's again, because of some of the guarantees that the language doesn't provide. So he also felt that back then we were when we were building silicon, developing silica, he felt that there is an opportunity to actually build a safer language that could be easy to use, at the same time, be able to provide stronger guarantees. And you know, after that, you know, we saw Viper coming in the Ethereum ecosystem, we saw, I think, recently, a language called Fey coming. I think, after that, I think Cardano started to work on their own language called Plutus algorrand developed their own language. So in a way that created a sort of chain reaction where people felt that this, this is an area of development, that people need to focus on to make language better because, in the end, many of these contracts actually handle hundreds of million dollars worth of assets, but billions of dollars worth of assets. And you want to make sure that it's safe to hold that. So these are two sort of key areas, which we started with, again, that have created a lot of different tentacles. One, me I would claim that you know, we have changed our impact on other people we but we have seen, that other people have actually started to work on symbolizes was that I feel that there's some contribution to the blockchain ecosystem.

Anatoly (00:09):Hey folks, this is Anatoly and you're listening to The Solana Podcast. And today I have with me Tommy and Taylor, co-founders of the PsyOptions protocol. Awesome to have you guys.Tommy (00:18):Thanks for having us.Taylor (00:19):Thanks for having us.Anatoly (00:21):Cool. So what's the origin story? How did you guys get into crypto and what made you build PsyOptions?Tommy (00:27):Crypto, it goes back to... I remember watching the Ethereum ICO, just being a broke college student, but felt we were too broke to actually throw anything into and that's a big regret, but that shaped up how we got into Solana later on. Really dove deep into everything back in 2017, right before the summer hype. And then in the summer hype, tried developing a little bit on Ethereum, doing some solidity development in the spare time, but I never jumped full time into it until PsyOptions. Taylor has a little bit of a different history with crypto.Taylor (01:03):Yeah. I've actually been full-time in crypto since late 2017, after Tommy and I shut down a previous business we started in school. We were looking for different things to do and I knew crypto had a lot of hype in 2017. I was like, "All right, this is definitely an industry I could see myself being a part of." I eventually took a job at Blockfolio and then as well as doing some freelance solidity development and then been full-time ever since.Anatoly (01:27):How did you guys meet? What was the genesis for you guys to go build PsyOptions?Tommy (01:32):Well, Taylor and I are twins, so we met a long, long time ago. We've always been hacking on ideas and stuff. And I guess, Taylor had his eye on Solana from 2018, right Taylor?Taylor (01:47):Yeah, pretty early on. I remember Multicoin writing about it. I was like, "Oh, this is actually a really sweet architecture, solves a lot of problems that we saw in Ethereum." And kept following before Mainnet beta was launched.Tommy (01:59):Yeah. And so we had been tinkering around, created a GitHub organization last summer, like the same one we're using now and just started reading the documentation. And then had a few projects we tried in the fall that never really took off. And then in October we were surfing with Tristan from FTX and he was just talking about Serum and everything that they were working on. So we knew what was in the pipeline and had that in the back of our mind. We did the first hackathon, did in place, built a trusted third party Oracle. And then after that had an issue with TradFi, trying to get API access to automate a options trading strategy, and that was what kicked it off. We were for fresh off that first hackathon, wanted a fresh idea, had our feet wet in Solana. And it was like, "Taylor, what if we just built options into the blockchain? We can get this API access built in. We have the order book already there, there's some basic infrastructure." And that was the genesis.Anatoly (02:59):That's awesome. Limited access to data was one of the reasons I started building this thing. Because I used to try to build stupid deep learning models on interactive brokers and you never have access to data. It's always even the quality is really suspects. It's like, "Do I really know that this is where things got executed? Or did they just copy and paste stuff from a database with a bunch of errors?"Tommy (03:26):Yep.Taylor (03:26):That's terrible. Yeah. If you want good data quality, you have to pay up for it. That's why Bloomberg Terminal is what 20, 25K a month. And if you're just the hobbyist or just trying stuff out, it's just not feasible to pay that much.Anatoly (03:41):Yeah. This is to me I think part of the beauty of the space right now, is that you can build up a lot of what finance is with just a bunch of hobbyist. It's like Linux. Linux in the '90s, you're competing with Microsoft, billions of dollars of engineers buildings stuff, but it's just a bunch of people over the weekend can compete. It's crazy.Tommy (04:03):Yeah. It's wild.Taylor (04:04):I think that's one of the best parts, all that coordination.Anatoly (04:07):So what are the challenges? You guys are one of the earliest I would say teams working on Solana. What have you guys seen, or what were the real painful points? What got better? What still sucks?Tommy (04:18):Oh man. All right. This first Solana season hackathon, the one that we won, we wrote everything in Solana native. I remember pinging [Armani 00:04:29] back in February saying, "Hey, I hear you're working on some framework, can I poke around? And checking out the repository." But it wasn't anywhere near complete or, I didn't dive in enough to use it for the hackathon. So now I rewrote the entire American option protocol in Anchor and it took me very little time to actually write that. So the development life cycle and just ease of getting up to speed, has improved ridiculously.Taylor (05:07):Yeah. And documentation has improved too.Anatoly (05:07):That's awesome. What is Anchor doing for you guys that Native, Rust isn't?Taylor (05:13):It's helped simplify our integration tests. So that's one thing that we try to do when we first started was, we wrote our own integration testing framework in Rust. I guess I wouldn't even call it a framework, it was pretty rough. But Anchor takes care of that. You're just writing your test in JavaScript, it's pretty easy to get up and running. And then also handling a lot of different edge cases that you wouldn't have to think about, checking account addresses and other things just to bring safety in. And it removes a lot of those headaches that, if you're just getting started and trying to hack something together, you're not really going to be thinking about.Tommy (05:48):Yeah. I think the account, de-serializing accounts, token accounts and things like that. You just have your accounts structure, passing that into the context and it de-serializes all that. The amount of little issues we had just because oh, we mis-ordered one thing in the array when we were refactoring, the accounts array, and it's like, "What the hell is going on?" And then you're trying to debug and add messages and stuff, because you're just like, "Oh man. And what is..." And then it all turns out to be a typo or you fat fingered moving one line up or, and it was... So the account structure and dealing with that is just incredibly easy. You don't have to de-serialize anything yourself.Well, anything that has a token, SPL token program or even some of the DEX infrastructure. And it makes cross program invocations a lot easier. I've been working with some teams for this hackathon, and wrote a bunch of cross program invocation examples for these teams to get up and running with PsyOptions pretty quickly. And it was just seamless for them to use our data structures and serialize it, de-serialize, because as long as we're all using the same framework, it works.Anatoly (06:56):Yeah. This was is my decision, so you can blame me, but I really didn't want to build a shitty framework. And until people started building on Solana, it was really hard to know, what do they need? I think it would've been worse if we built a bunch of code that nobody could build with, because it would've been incomplete. I'm going to say, it takes a lot of discipline to do that, versus laziness.Tommy (07:22):It makes sense to offload it on to the actual DAP developers. It's a different beast when you're programming the underlying system versus the actual just Solana runtime program. So it makes a lot of sense how Anchor came out and who really is leading it.Anatoly (07:40):Can you guys tell me what worked really well? Or what features or anything for any other Devs that when they're coming into building on Solana, what stuff actually feels like a superpower?Taylor (07:52):Well, one thing that's improved a ton is the SPL token program and how you manage the token accounts and whatnot. That's definitely something that a lot of the new developers on Solana don't have to deal with. But back then we were building into our UI the ability to have multiple accounts for the same SPL token and it was super frustrating and whatnot. So using those associated token accounts and other kind of, I guess you could call them rapper programs or things like that, that just improve the UX significantly. Understanding those and why they're there is pretty important when someone's getting started.Tommy (08:30):I think taking it a step further too, how does the associated token program work? And what's really under the hood is the program derived address. I put together some documentation for people starting to onboard to PsyOptions or related protocols. And I'm like, you need to read up all these Twitter threads, these documentations on PDAs, because there's just so many things you can do with a PDA that's very unique. You can get a mapping just to accounts, you can create a unique constraint. So for PsyOptions, there should never be... Right now, there's no reason to have more than one of the same option and the fungibility of those options are based on the expiration date, the strike price, the asset pair. And so we just have a PDA that is seated with those parameters and it creates this unique constraint.Anatoly (09:24):Oh, that's cool. So you encode the constraints as, basically hash it into the address.Tommy (09:30):Exactly.Taylor (09:30):Exactly.Anatoly (09:31):And the taker then has to satisfy those constraints to be able to take that trade.Tommy (09:36):No, not on the trade level, just on the general structure for creating the option. It's like, okay, if you want to spin up a BTC 70,000, USDC strike for the October 29th expiration, just that structure that creates that... because that's structure is the core structure of PsyOptions, the Psy American program. And that's what then controls the option TokenMint and writer TokenMint and how you dull out those option tokens. And so it's just there can never be more than one of those specific to those constraints. So it's separated from the trading concerns.Anatoly (10:14):Got it.Taylor (10:15):Yeah. I think you thinking of your stateless escrow. I thought that was a pretty cool proof of concept.Anatoly (10:21):Yeah. I wasn't sure that you guys already built... I think this idea has been around in crypto for a while, so I wouldn't be surprised if you guys use it too. But I like that idea that, because you don't want to generate infinite number of these markets, if everybody enters the same data, then it's going to spit out the same BTC month increment whatever, like May 2021 option or whatever you want.Tommy (10:47):Yeah. And we've seen it too. It's really useful to have these deterministic ways to look up an account address. So it's like, "Look, I can just check if this option market already exists by using these parameters, the PsyOptions market exists." And we also ran into some issues that we had to hack together, on the client side, because Serum doesn't have these kinds of constraints. And an adversary could come in and spin up multiple Serum markets for the same asset pair. And then when you're pulling that data from the chain on the client, it's like, "Well, which one is your UI using? Which one are these automated traders using? All that kind of stuff. How do you sync them up?"And so that was a pain point, and we had to whip together a package. But now with Serum's permission markets and some other stuff, we can now use PDAs to say, "This is deterministically how the UI is going to determine the market. Here's how everyone else should do it. These are the seeds." And then it keeps everyone in line in a more decentralized way, rather than having to have some NPM package with metadata and it's painful to maintain.Anatoly (11:54):Got it. That's cool. What actually runs the market? Is it a Serum Q, a Serum V2 or V3 Q?Tommy (12:03):Serum V3 right now, for the Americans. Yeah.Anatoly (12:05):Awesome. Man, that's super cool. How was that integration? Is that blood, sweat and tears still, or are the tooling itself around Serum getting better?Taylor (12:15):It's getting better.Tommy (12:16):Blood, sweat and tears.Taylor (12:17):Yeah, but it was definitely blood, sweat and tears. I think that's what took us the longest part in the original hackathon that we won, was doing the Serum integration. And we weren't even doing any cross program invocations to Serum at that point, it was literally just client site integration. And that was really difficult. No documentation, got to read through the source code. I think we even found some bugs in their type script package and had to patch it ourselves. So yeah, definitely blood, sweat, and tears there.Tommy (12:48):There's still room for improvement. I'm like drop in list every time as hackathon participants start asking, or users are complaining about settling funds. I'm just at a constant stream of, "Hey, we should document this and add a flow chart for that." Because all the customer surface is offloaded to the people using the Serum stuff, so we get that inflow of feedback from users and other developers building on top.Anatoly (13:12):Yeah. People don't realize how strapped every team is.Tommy (13:16):I agree.Anatoly (13:17):It's literally like three, four engineers at best to, no customer service, no nothing, just pure software, open source software. It's not like when you look at a market cap of something, you think there's a equivalent to market cap S&P 500 company with 30,000 engineers just all cranking away. Thank God it's not, honestly.Tommy (13:41):Yeah.Taylor (13:42):Yeah. It's got its ups and downs. At least you can move fast, it's not a bureaucratic process. But at the same time, customer support definitely dwindles and I think 70% of people are probably testing in production. So the end users are just going to have to deal with that and understand that's just the way things are done in crypto right now.Anatoly (14:03):I guess, how close are you guys to launch and what are the next blockers?Tommy (14:07):So we actually are on Mainnet trading with BTC and ETH markets right now. We have been live since the end of August, just with BTC and ETH for the September strike. Then we upgraded to a V2 of our American protocol with Serum permission markets, so we can eventually close those markets. And so that gives us the ability to open a bunch more. And so we're live with those, we're working with a couple other partners to get some SOL markets up pretty soon. So we'll probably announce that here.Anatoly (14:40):Awesome. What have you guys seen in terms of adoption, and how are people using it and has anyone surprised you with what they're doing?Tommy (14:49):It's tough right now from the retail side using our user interface. I think what the biggest thing that I'm excited... There's been a lot of great feedback. Options are not an easy instrument to use, managing your own positions is tough. And so we've gotten a lot of great feedback from the community and it's shaping what some of these projects that are work thing on during this hackathon. I think that's what's most interesting and surprising is these teams that are building on top and they're not user interfaces. These are protocols that are going to be managing certain strategies and rolling positions for users, and so you can have this more passive product. It's like a ribbon finance to the basic ones, where it's just selling covered calls and secured puts or things that.But there's a lot of plans, I don't want to leak their Alpha. But a lot of plans for additional products where it's more just, set it and forget it. And it has certain properties detailed out to hedge for various things, give you certain direction on volatility. And it'll make these... all these products, some more user friendly for retail, but also big institutions that are looking to hedge existing exposure.Anatoly (16:00):That sounds like you guys are building more of info level for options.Tommy (16:04):Yep.Anatoly (16:05):That's awesome.Taylor (16:06):Yeah. We chalk up the V1 American that we built as just a primitive, and as decentralize as possible. It doesn't rely on Oracles, it doesn't need pricing information. So the only dependency is the Solana runtime and SPL token program, I guess now Serum with the permission markets. But the original one had only SPL token as dependency.Tommy (16:29):Yeah. So there's capital inefficiency with the American style, because you can exercise at any time up until the expiration. So we're about to hopefully announce pretty soon, we have a European that we've architected and we're going to break ground on that and we'll crank it out pretty quickly. That will have a little bit more dependencies, but it'll be more capital efficient because it'll be auto exercised and we'll have a margining system built into it. And the American will continue on because we're going to build, I like to call it Carta for DeFi, but just a place where people... We whipped out a vesting contract the other week. And we'll be able to show people their tokens that are vesting, their options that are vesting, the ones that have currently vested and the options all in their portfolio and whether they should exercise them or not. It'd be less like trading based and more of just an interface for managing your portfolio of vesting stuff and options, so.Anatoly (17:33):That's awesome. How many engineers do you guys have?Tommy (17:38):We actually just hired another front-end guy today. So we're two full-time front-ends, and we hired another protocol developer, so we're two full-time protocol developers. Then we have a community guy and a marketing guy, and then couple of part-time and open source contributors.Anatoly (17:52):That's so small, I mean that's awesome. I feel this is the biggest thing in crypto, is how fast small teams can ship really sophisticated products.Tommy (18:04):Yeah. I think, as I've learned, the hardest thing nowadays or right now is, it's not the programming, it's the architecting the system to fit the runtime and developing the instruction set. And once you wrap your head around how that whole system works and you have your instruction set, writing the actual code is not that hard. If you actually take the time to just think and focus, and you have to have the knowledge and experience to understand that, it's pretty easy to start architecting a bunch of stuff and delegating and managing a little bit more.Taylor (18:35):The thing I will say on that though is that, the runtime changes here and there, but the changes aren't that drastic. But when you're using dependencies like Serum, Pyth, whatnot, those change a ton. And so you're seeing a ton of changes on Serum, so one week you might have architected something for Serum B3, sounds great. All of a sudden Serum updates to some new thing and that might change the optimal architecture for it. So you have to be nimble in order to just go with the flow as different protocols update, and as new versions come out and new architectures are viable.Anatoly (19:14):It's weird to think of immutable code still having dependencies. But something with Serum, you're so dependent on liquidity in those markets that if they move to V4, you have to update because you can't point to a empty market.Tommy (19:29):Yeah. We bring a lot the liquidity ourselves. Well, these are brand new markets that we spin up. It's not as much of a pain point, it's more just announcing and coordinating. But it's more of the European protocol and architecture, it depends on a lot of the stuff like... it doesn't depend heavily on the SPL token, contracts aren't represented as SPLs. And so it depends on this new architecture that they just announced, that Bonfida has been working on. So it's just interesting, you have to keep up to speed with what exists in the ecosystem, so you can constantly be like, "Is there an improvement? Can we squeeze something out of this is?"Anatoly (20:03):Is the European option, are you also planning for it to be Oracle free, or no Oracle?Tommy (20:08):No. We'll rely on an Oracle just for the exercise. We're wrapping up the architecture and probably just, we're going to develop this one totally open source from the scratch. I just put up the boiler plate repository and its open source. We're going to open source, or at least make public the architecture, so everyone can read and comment on it while we're just cranking it out in the next week and a half. So there's a Oracle dependency just on one instruction, just to actually lock in the index price, that would be for the expiration. But we don't see it being too risky of a dependency, considering it's not an instruction that has a lot going on so we can do a lot of checks. We could pull two different Oracles and reduce the potential pitfalls there.Anatoly (20:53):Yeah. This is a hard problem too. When an option is exercise it's still going to hit the Serum market to actually exercise the price?Tommy (21:03):No. So on the base layer, the European, it's just going to... essentially the architecture is locking in the price, and then users basically have to settle up the positions and collateral themselves.Anatoly (21:14):Got it.Tommy (21:14):The best way to describe this one is Deribit on chain. It's really just like P&L, not the full underlying.Anatoly (21:22):Okay. So you can actually settle in any collateral. You could have an option on SOL, but settle in wrapped ETH or whatever?Tommy (21:29):Well this one, it's actually going to be... well, it's going to settle in the currency that it's trading. So BTC, it's going to have this siloed market and account that holds all the BTC and manages the entire portfolio, margining for someone's BTC options. And so it has it's own realm of just, this is the BTC world. And everything settles in BTC, everything's traded in BTC and premiums are even in BTC, but then it just uses the USD index price to actually settle up on the strike. And then SOL would have its own world, with its own portfolio margins system. So they're not cross margined between all those at the moment.Anatoly (22:10):Got it. Is cross margining something you guys are also thinking about?Tommy (22:15):Yeah. It's one of those things where we want to just crank this out and ship fast, because it's improved from the existing architecture, for when it comes to a trading perspective. And then we'll discuss a more improved cross margining system.Anatoly (22:27):Do you think that there's a gap still in this idea that I think, what's popular on DeFi Ethereum is liquidity mining, and I just want to put my tokens and get yield? And is there a gap between that and options trading and central limit order books?Taylor (22:46):I think there's a knowledge gap. The closer you are to dealing with the primitives, the more knowledge you need to have, the more hands on you have to be in managing your positions and whatnot. So I think that reduces the addressable market or the end users that are willing to participate. And so that's why you have people building programs and tooling on up to manage the position, so it can be more passive. Because I think that's one of the biggest things that drove a ton of people to DeFi, is the passive yield, all the token incentive programs and whatnot. So I do think that there's a bit of a gap, but it's slowly being closed. And the more passive it can be, the more non crypto people or even crypto native people, but the less financially sophisticated you could say will come in and utilize DeFi.Anatoly (23:39):So you guys imagine that... or there's probably somebody already building this, where I have my token, I'm an LP, which is under the actual thing behind that position is a covered call or some other fancy strategy, iron condors or whatever, right?Tommy (23:58):Yeah. So there's a couple teams from the hackathon building that right now, actually.Anatoly (24:03):That's awesome.Tommy (24:04):That's what I'm really excited about. Because that's what we've seen is, there's decent order flow, I haven't looked at the volumes because we're just very focused on product. We know what the low hanging fruit is, so we're not focusing on the vanity metrics at the moment and not really talking about the TVL and whatnot. But it'll just increase order flow because these people can just get passive yield from covered call products, or they can hedge certain positions just by depositing tokens. And it's all going to be managing these underlying options and straddles and things like that.Anatoly (24:38):How long does it take to go from, let's say I wanted to build an iron condor or something that as a strategy, can I do that? Do you guys have examples already, reference implementations for things like that?Tommy (24:53):Are you talking as a protocol or as just a user, using the... like a client?Anatoly (24:58):As a, here's my DAP, I'll take tokens from LPs and then automatically generate the position on PsyOptions.Tommy (25:07):The hard part actually isn't to the generating the initial positions, the hard part is handling how they want to roll, if you're trying to do it over time, where they just can keep that open. So the generating the positions is super easy, placing the orders. We have examples, CPI examples in the repository for minting options, exercising, placing an order, opening a Serums open orders account, all that kind of stuff. Just been cranking out examples as people ask for them. And then, it's onto those teams to handle that really tough part of, how should we roll? There's certain concerns in there for manipulation. There's certain concerns for front running, there's certain concerns for eating through the order book and having to build your own TWAP into it and stuff like that, so.Anatoly (25:59):Yeah. Man, you guys are taking on some really tough challenges, that's cool. This is something that I wanted to get good at, trading. Trading options and deep learning into these things, but I got it to work.Taylor (26:15):Yeah. It's a full time job. That's why we try to focus on the primitive and lower layers and try to get that right. So then other teams can focus, if they're much more financially savvy or have of better trading backgrounds, can handle that. It's a full-time job to be a trader, to come up with those models, to build those positions and roll them, it takes a long time. And you constantly have to be updating them too.Anatoly (26:44):How long did you guys trade options before?Taylor (26:47):Not much. We're just retail traders. I interned at an investment bank once a while back, but to the extent of my full-time finance career, that was about it. And then we would trade options here and there, but nothing serious. And then, when we wanted to automate that option trading strategy, that would've been probably the first automated system we would've built. I don't think we built an automated option trading strategy before that.Tommy (27:15):Yeah. I would say we relate best with the retail, speculative, YOLO option users, rather than very sophisticated options traders. But it's been nice building this and winning that hackathon and getting some attention, because then those people show up. And we have some really smart TradFi people who have been around crypto, some really smart TradFi people who have never been around crypto, contributing to the thought leadership of where we should go, what's needed to get to certain structured products and things like that. And that's been super helpful because we've been early in Solana and have the engineering capabilities and knowledge to work with them of a translating their vision into a Solana architecture. And so we've just been helping as many teams as possible that have that background and can bring that knowledge. And then, that's why we're just like, "Look, we'll help you as much as we can because you're going to help us answer some of these questions that we don't know." So it's been good to fill out the team and the surrounding circles with that.Anatoly (28:23):Do you think that DeFi is something that... I always think of it as growing faster than TradFi versus replacing it. Do you think these products are good enough to compete with traditional finance, or are we just going to see more stuff being built on open finance because it's easier? I don't have to go talk to a CME to launch an option for my in-game bullets for my shooter game or something like that.Tommy (28:52):I think it will be just the fact that it's open and anyone can do it. Looking at the architecture here and designing an ideal architecture for the most capital efficiency system, it's just not really... You could do it in CeFi so much easier than you can do it in DeFi. I don't even know if it's truly possible. We're still just on the back burner trying to figure out how you could portfolio margin everything. I think a lot of teams that we've talked to are all thinking about that in the back burners. It's like, how do we margin against everything? So I think it's definitely moving faster. I think they will rival CeFi, a lot of these products, but I think they're still going to be both working hand-in-hand.Taylor (29:42):Yeah. I think both have their ups and downs. The speed that DeFi innovates because of the open source nature and things can be represented and it's all digitally native, it just makes the pace of innovation faster, also makes what you can build much faster. Like CeFi you're beholden to, not that you're not beholden to regulation in DeFi, but CeFi there's a lot more red tape. You got to jump through hoops in order to be able to launch a market or... You can't just launch your own equities exchange, it's takes tons of money and resources and whatnot. So it stifles innovation in that respect. So I think even if DeFi can't become as capital efficient as CeFi, you're still going to have more innovative products, more flexibility in what you can do with your assets, that at the end of the day, you might not need that capital efficient, high, super fast, low latency systems to do what you want to do with your assets. So I think there's a place for both. And I think DeFi is just going to continue to innovate and outpace growth in terms of TradFi.Anatoly (31:00):Well, our goal is to get that latency to be as low as physics allow, and then we're competitive.Tommy (31:10):That's why we're here.Taylor (31:10):Let's do it, man.Anatoly (31:11):Won't rest until we're building neutrino emitter detector. I just think with gaming especially, the first massive multiplayer games instantly within six months had a market for the digital items there. As soon as you get something like Star Atlas or equivalent, like World of Warcraft that's decentralized with all these assets on chain, I think the idea of options as a service, people are just going to, "Well, I got whatever... I got more gold that people want to use because this game is hot right now." People are going to definitely spin up those markets, it's just going to happen.Tommy (31:48):100%. We've been talking about game... we're gamers ourselves, and I haven't played a game since I really dove into Solana development 11, 12 months ago. But I'm hoping to get back to it once Star Atlas and Aurory and all those other... Kaiju cards, everyone starts actually launching the game play, I'll jump back to gaming. But we've been thinking about it a lot and what could be done with this American primitive, and that got us into talking to other teams and other games, just to see what's out there. And then I actually got connected with Metaplex and built out a contract that they just announced that's focused on gaming. And it all stemmed from trying to think about, these games, everyone's so early and not really thinking about how these game assets are going to plug and play into DeFi protocols and things like that. And there's still just so much work and research that needs to be done, and some infrastructure needs to be built for it all to work perfectly together.Taylor (32:42):Yeah. I think the interoperability for gaming is still... there's still going to be some rough edges there, because it's harder to build standards across games. But I think you'll have a few games come out and maybe they'll have transferability between games and whatnot, but it's going to take some time and some trial and error before we get to this on chain metaverse where you can transfer assets between different game worlds and whatnot. But I do think that is going to be one of the ultimate killer applications on blockchain.Anatoly (33:19):What are you guys excited about out of this hackathon?Tommy (33:22):Oh, for me, it's really just the stuff we've mentioned with the structured products, passive yield products, all that kind of stuff, being built on top of PysOptions. I'm very heads down on product and everything at the moment. So aside from the people that are ping me, asking me for help, I don't really know what else is being built.Anatoly (33:42):Yeah, likewise. I see NFTs being launched and then I'm deep in the trenches and optimizations. I guess that's good. It means that there's more stuff to do than you have time, so you started actually going heads down and working.Tommy (34:00):But there's a lot. The roadmap with just these teams alone, is ridiculous. We have so many products that we want to whip out on top, and hoping to launch the first few in the next week or two. And then the framework's there, it'll be a little bit easier.Taylor (34:14):Well, it's just fun to see people building on software that you've built. I'm sure you and the rest of the Solana team get excited as new projects come out and new people innovate. And I think that's one of the more fun things to do, is just sit and watch what people come up with because you can't come up with every idea yourself, so might as well open source stuff and have community run with it.Anatoly (34:33):For sure. What should we be looking out for? Do you guys have any announcements you want to leak?Tommy (34:40):Oh man. SOL options coming soon. Passive yield products that will make it extremely easy for people to get volatility exposure or generate yield. And this is yield that's not going to go away. A lot of these pools are based on rewards, and API is based on rewards and things that will dry up and aren't sustainable. But the volatility is a little bit more sustainable in a sense. Sure volatility will decrease over time, but.Anatoly (35:09):So these are like covered call strategies, basically?Tommy (35:12):The first few are the most simple covered call and secured put strategies. But then there's going to be a few other vaults coming out once these are launched, then it'll be focus on a few other vaults that have different strategies. Eventually, we started talking to some other teams like Symmetry, because we want to get a good crypto index, because then if we get liquid index options, we can create a nice volatility index for certain baskets. So that's all on the horizon. And so, you need that rolling and rebalancing and infrastructure, and that's what we've been working on the past few weeks, or other teams have been working on. And then it's formulas for just managing array of positions.Anatoly (35:57):What is your development process like? How do you guys go to build test and ship?Taylor (36:03):In terms of roadmap and how we determine what to work on, it's pretty ad hoc, things change up weekly, biweekly. But we try to run in two week sprints, at least just pick like, "Okay, what... base on user feedback, check GitHub for issues." Obviously anything that's blocking usage is number one priority. And then it's, "All right. What do we want to see built? What do our partner teams need, and how can we get them going?" I don't know Tommy, you have anything to add to that?Tommy (36:35):Yeah. Protocol development too. I'd sit and focus and start drafting up a full architecture doc with the instruction sets and potential functions that are needed, black box some stuff, just to make it a little bit easier and then put a to-do to dive in later. And then you have this whole instruction set and a general outline and framework, and you know it fits into the Solana runtime because you've made sure that the constraints are handled. And then I'll dive into running a test driven development process with Anchor, just doing full integration test. You end up writing a lot more test code, but I just find that the confidence level is so much higher. You can refactor and upgrade versions and you're just so of confident in your code when you have all those tests, so. And then, it cuts down the time from DevNet testing, where everyone just puts up a contract and then just relies on interacting it to test it. Especially when you're building a primitive, you want to have all those cases handled.Anatoly (37:36):In your use case specifically with options, what bug are the most worrisome? Is it overflow or actual logic and economic?Tommy (37:45):Probably logic and economics. The American protocol, overflow is not an issue, not really. We do all the check map of course, but it's not an issue. Maybe if we get some weird [Altcoins 00:37:58] eventually trading, then we'll have some weird issues. But I'd really just say logic, economic attacks, things like that, when we get into the capital efficient Europeans that has the margining system built into the base layer, and liquidation built in the base layer. And just always thinking about account management. You have that limitation of number of accounts you can pass in, and how to architect around that.Anatoly (38:19):So if Solana could change one thing, what would it be? Or anything, and things-Taylor (38:24):Two things.Anatoly (38:29):... two things. Finite numberTaylor (38:29):Fixed account length. If we could make it-Tommy (38:32):Oh, sure yeah.Taylor (38:33):... dynamic sized, I think that would be great.Anatoly (38:36):The length of the data.Taylor (38:37):Yeah.Anatoly (38:37):Okay.Taylor (38:38):The account data.Anatoly (38:39):That's actually... I don't know if you guys saw, but believe-re growing reallocation from the program itself or the account that it owns, I think it might be live already in 1.8.Tommy (38:49):Yeah. I saw ...Taylor (38:51):I think I saw the PR for that.Anatoly (38:52):Okay.Taylor (38:53):But that's one thing that... Sorry, but when people jump over from ETH to Solana, that's probably the biggest gotcha, that we're like, "Oh crap. I can't readjust or create a larger array, more mapping data, whatever." So that's one thing. And then also the number of accounts you can pass to an instruction [crosstalk 00:39:14].Anatoly (39:13):In a transaction. Yeah.Taylor (39:15):... open up more. Yeah.Tommy (39:17):And I think 1.8 handles a lot of these headaches, but you still, when you're trying to think, for the long term, just the limitations in general. I'm assuming they're always going to be there, the number of accounts you can pass in, can't be-Anatoly (39:32):109, the goal is to double the transaction size basically. So the number of bytes that a transaction can maximum size. That means you can double the user data or encode more, put more accounts in there. So there's always a limit because of the real time nature of the system. You're not submitting an arbitrary large transaction that then the block producer decides, "Okay, I'm going to pick this one." You're really like, "How do I write to the block right now?" And making sure that doesn't slow everything down, is a challenge. But really cool, man, you guys are shipping like crazy. It's awesome. It blows my mind that you guys were hackathon team that is now... there's teams in the hackathon building on top of PsyOptions.Tommy (40:23):I love it.Anatoly (40:24):Yeah.Tommy (40:24):I've been doing office hours, every Tuesday and Thursday, just letting people come in and ask questions because it's just nice to see people building on top. And we're going to do whatever we can to help them out and keep them there.Anatoly (40:36):That's super cool. Man, really good to catch up with you. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Is there anything you want to add for the listeners in the final bit?Tommy (40:46):Yeah. I would say, check out PsyOptions to trade your BTC and ETH right now, SOL coming soon. And then we'll be announcing an under collateralized European protocol pretty shortly, going to try and crank that out as quickly as possible.Taylor (41:00):Yeah. And get in touch. There's no shortage of projects that we can dream of and I'm sure others are too, but happy to help any team out that we can.Tommy (41:08):Yeah. And if you're a protocol too, looking to do option liquidity mining with American PsyOptions, reward contributors with options, or use the PsyOptions vesting contract, we're trying to get that. The vesting contract's a unique one, where you can delay your vest. The recipient has the option to delay their vest if the issuer grants it. So that way they can keep pumping the vesting and the potential taxable event. Not an accountant, so don't take that tax advice. Not financial advice.Anatoly (41:39):Not accounting advice, not financial advice. That's awesome.Tommy (41:42):Yeah.Taylor (41:42):No advice.Anatoly (41:44):That's super cool. Well, thank you guys.Tommy (41:46):Thank you.Taylor (41:47):Thanks for having us

James & Julian Spediacci invested in the Ethereum ICO during the early Bitcoin days. We talk about why they made the investment after meeting Vitalik, price outlook, why they are still holding, Defi, the original vision, ETH killers, and more. Thank you for listening to the show. If you could please leave me a rating on iTunes, I would really appreciate it. Tweet me your thoughts about the episode! Show sponsors: •Matcha: Find the best prices across crypto exchange networks: https://matcha.xyz/luke •Fun, Fast, and Fair gaming with a dedicated Bitcoin company: Sportsbet.io •Bybit: Trade Bitcoin, ETH, EOS, and XRP derivatives and get a deposit bonus with the show link: Bybit.com

Look I am outside in beautiful Salt Lake City! This Bitcoin compilation show has 4 parts. 1. Outside with Adam talking about current news. 2. Everyone lies when living under a totalitarianism regime. It is is very important to keep on telling the truth so totalitarianism will never take hold. Saying a "system" is keeping you down is an excuse. Fighting slavery means not fitting in! Most people fear not fitting in! Conscientiousness! 3. Classic Matt Brown interview talking about Ethereum, BSV, and more. 4. Very short 2017 clip where you see how strong a hand I had even back then during the ICO madness and how ICOs did not tempt me at all despite the host being very interested in them. Compiled in Salt Lake City, UT! Watch the show here-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2nuSo-Waxg Follow Adam on Twitter- https://twitter.com/TechBalt All of the BitcoinMeister videos are here at- http://DisruptMeister.com Financially support the podcast here- https://anchor.fm/bitcoinmeister/support BOOKMARK SPORTSMEISTER.com DISRUPTMEISTER.com & TECHBALT.com --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/bitcoinmeister/support

Brock Pierce has been at the heart of almost every major innovation and event in Web 3 from being an early investor in and Chairman of The Bitcoin Foundation. He has raised more funding for crypto startups than anyone else on the planet, pioneering the first Initial Coin Offering with Mastercoin in 2013 which triggered the run to a $20bn 2017 ‘ICO Boom’. He co-founded Blockchain Capital the first blockchain VC, and with them conducted the first STO (Security Token Offering). As co-founder of EOS he conducted not just the largest ICO but largest crowdfunding event in history raising $4bn. As an investor, he was one of the largest backers of Ethereum ICO but also cofounded Tether the first asset-backed stablecoin. He talks candidly about how being an early founder in gaming and esports in the 90s and 00s gave him an edge in understanding the rising importance of digital currency & assets like NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) as well as by growing a powerful network of founders, once described as the ‘Crypto Illuminati’, he built information asymmetry to spot and act on market opportunities.

Kyle Chassé, a cryptocurrency/blockchain industry veteran and technology entrepreneur, has founded, advised and invested in numerous early stage blockchain projects since his initial investment in Bitcoin in 2012. During 2013, Kyle founded World Super Lotto (WSL), the world’s first global lottery based on Bitcoin and went all-in on Bitcoin. In 2014 WSL went live and Kyle used some of his Bitcoin gains to participate in the Ethereum ICO followed by exploring infrastructure projects making investments in BnkToTheFuture, Pundi X, Bitstamp, Kraken, Shapeshift, Coinpayments and several others. In 2015 Kyle took on a full-time role as COO of Credits, built from scratch Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) company. In 2016, Kyle was deemed “smart money” by investors during this time period as he began lucratively analysing, investing, and advising infrastructure and protocol projects from Coinbase, UBANX, Bitfinex, ULTRA, RNDR, and several others, holding impressive amounts of equity and tokens. Towards the end of 2018, Kyle founded Master Ventures (MV) - a blockchain advisory & think tank based in Koh Phangan. MV combines the skills of several executives, each with a master skillset and have all held C-Level executive positions at various startups, hedge funds, VC, and more. Master Ventures advises Tier 1 projects like Spl.yt, UBANX, EVEN Network, Ultra.io, and Elrond. Sign up for Token Metrics at https://tokenmetrics.com ✔ Follow us on social media below: ► Telegram Alerts Channel: https://t.me/TokenMetricsAlerts ► Telegram Discussion Group: https://t.me/TokenMetricsDiscussion ► Twitter: https://twitter.com/tokenmetricsinc ► Instagram: https://instagram.com/tokenmetrics ► Facebook: https://facebook.com/tokenmetrics

Today we are going to talk with Ashton Addison who runs the Crypto Coin Show about how the blockchain is the best solution to stop counterfeit items like tickets, documents and other items. Questions Why is it so important to be on blockchain? So how exactly does the blockchain ensure that important items like event tickets are not counterfeit? Can’t you do a smart ticket? Where you get a free drink, a virtual item that acts like a digital sourvenir and maybe a ticket card that is stored forever in a wallet to show off to your friends? What about the peer to peer selling of tickets? What are the roadblocks to adoption of it? What other uses cases does the blockchain have for these types of use cases? How about title insurance? IN 100 words or less, if you could invest a fictional $100,000 in one or two cryptos, what would they be and why? Bitcoin, just because bitcoin runs the entire cryptocurrency market still. Secondly, Ethereum. Ethereum has done so much for the community and helped expand the market cap exponentially. There are also many developers working on ETH for the launch of ETH 2.0, and the price back to all time high is a nice bonus too. Key Takeaway: Create events and secure your tickets on the blockchain to have counterfeit proof tickets, without needing to understand blockchain, and accept cryptocurrency (and fiat too) for the tickets to help spread the adoption of blockchain, at eventchain.io. Also, we can push people to our YouTube channel, Crypto Coin Show.  Where can they reach you? ashton@cryptocoinshow.com  t-me/eventchain Bio: Ashton has been involved in the blockchain industry since 2013, through the initial rise of Bitcoin price and the lead up to the Ethereum ICO. As the CEO and Founder of EventChain, he pioneered the team through a successful raise in September of 2017. He also advises other Blockchain companies globally including Syscoin and CoinPayments.net in Canada, Pundi X in Indonesia and SmartMesh in China. Together with EventChain and his associated blockchain projects he has helped raise over $50M altogether.  

主要内容：报告：ETH、Tron和EOS占据了去年Dapp 98%的交易量；Ripple首席执行官再次强调无法控制XRP价格，再遭社区抨击；欧盟第5项反洗钱指令已正式生效，纳入加密服务提供商；硬件钱包多品牌产品遭淘宝集体下架；媒体：比特大陆AI团队裁员200余人，上百员工抱团拒签；中国证券报：区块链技术对金融行业的影响是天翻地覆的。 ETC Agharta硬分叉预计将于12日18点进行，仍有51.1%的节点未准备就绪etcnodes数据显示，按目前出块速度计算，ETC Agharta硬分叉时间约为2020年1月12日18：00。小葱查询数据发现，截至目前，48.9%的节点已准备就绪，51.1%的节点未准备就绪。 报告：ETH、Tron和EOS占据了去年Dapp 98%的交易量Dapp Review关于加密去中心化应用的新报告指出，2019年对dapp来说是个好年头，对Tron和ETH来说尤其好。报告指出，去年，Tron、EOS和Ethereum在dapp上积累了230亿美元的交易量，在此过程中，Tron超越了EOS，成为事实上的dapp娱乐网络。随着加密经济的发展，领先的智能合约网络所扮演的角色也发生了变化。Ethereum已经从ICO转向了defi, Tron已经成为了赌博应用领域最杰出的dapp，EOS己处于两者之间。在加密领域，Ethereum、Tron和EOS占据了dapp所有交易总量的98%。（bitcoin.com） 交易所CobinHood或将关闭，曾被质疑为“退出骗局”CobinHood在一封发给用户的通知中表示，它正在审计所有账户余额并迁移数据。它将于2020年2月10日重新开放。然后，交易所将向所有用户发送关于取款过程的电子邮件，然后允许用户取回他们的余额。与此同时，CobinHood还敦促用户不要进行存款。据悉，该交易所在开曼群岛注册，但总部设在中国台湾。据了解，去年年初，该交易所出售了母公司DEXON Foundation的DEXON代币，不到一个月就筹集了350万美元。后来，该公司在2019年5月申请破产。因此被投资者质疑为“退出骗局”。（CoinGape） Ripple首席执行官再次强调无法控制XRP价格，再遭社区抨击Ripple首席执行官Brad Garlinghouse在接受CNN的采访时再次强调，由于XRP的去中心化，Ripple无法控制XRP的价格。Brad的言论再次遭到社区抨击，加密货币分析师Tone Vays发推称：“我以前说过，以后还会说。Ripple声称他们的欺诈币XRP是去中心化和不可控的，但如果伊朗和朝鲜开始使用Ripple作为全球货币和价值转移方式，只需要美国当局打个电话给Garlinghouse，这个shitcoin就没了。” Kik再次请求法院审判美国SEC关于ICO一案的指控Kik(再次)请求在与美国SEC关于ICO一案的法律纠纷中接受审判，Kik希望对美国证券交易委员会(SEC)的指控进行审判，该委员会指控该公司在2017年的kin代币销售中进行了未经注册的证券发行。美国证券交易委员会周四提交了最新的诉讼进展情况，提供了初步的诉讼日程安排，并详细说明了双方安排其余部分作证的计划。（coindesk） Telegram称需要5至7周时间收集美国SEC所要求的代币销售相关信息Telegram表示需要五到七周时间来收集美国证券交易委员会（SEC）所要求其代币销售的有关信息。Telegram的律师事务所Skadden称，SEC的请求涵盖了12个国家和地区的770个个人和实体。而自9月以来Skadden只能审查76个实体，还需要更多时间来审查所有实体。(theblockcrypto) 欧盟第5项反洗钱指令已正式生效，纳入加密服务提供商欧盟第5项反洗钱指令（5AMLD）已于1月10日生效。5AMLD首次通过包括虚拟货币法币交易所或托管钱包提供商在内的加密服务提供商来扩大其监管范围。欧洲的加密货币公司正努力满足5AMLD提出的新监管准则。由于新法律要求了广泛的了解您的客户（KYC）和反洗钱（AML）程序，许多企业正在关闭。 硬件钱包多品牌产品遭淘宝集体下架比特派钱包发微博称，目前市场上所有品牌的区块链硬件钱包均已遭淘宝下架，包括BITHD、Cobo等品牌在内的产品均显示“宝贝不存在”、无法购买。此前，淘宝新增加了“区块链技术产品”二级类目，该类目下可以上架“带宽共享设备”和“数字货币硬件钱包”两类商品，即目前主流的数字加密货币硬件钱包可以在淘宝系统内上架销售。然而不到一个月的时间，此类产品便遭平台集体下架。 媒体：比特大陆AI团队裁员200余人，上百员工抱团拒签媒体向多位比特大陆相关业务线员工了解到，其AI团队将从360人裁到100人，从地域分布看，成都、武汉、上海和深圳的AI团队近乎“团灭”；从业务线看，100余人的服务器团队将被直接砍掉。同时，有200余名被裁员工因不满公司“N+1和期权，无承诺的13薪和保底年终奖”的赔偿方案，拉起维权群抱团拒签。但裁员指标和截止日期已定，公司以“现在不签，明天赔偿更少”相挟，无奈下签离职协议的员工越来越多。（星球日报） 中国证券报：区块链技术对金融行业的影响是天翻地覆的1月11日，中国证券报刊文“人工智能和区块链重塑未来金融形态”。文章表示，区块链技术对金融行业的影响是天翻地覆的。首先，在金融交易数据方面，存放在区块链系统中的数据安全性更高，区块链技术本身能够有效保证交易数据的安全性和真实性。区块链技术去中心化的特征，可以使数据更加透明，从根本上解决大量数据在第三方金融机构集中和形成信息孤岛的问题。其次，区块链技术本身不仅能够实现数据信息的永久性存储，而且能够通过对数据增加附加信息来实现数据信息归属的标识和产权的确认，这种机制能够有效地解决大数据共享与隐私保护之间的内在矛盾。这意味着每个个体都可以拥有自己的数据资产，这些数据资产同样可以带来相应的信用和其他衍生价值。最后，区块链技术依赖程序算法，实现公开透明的交易规则，使所有参与节点能够自动运行，共同维护，共同进行信用支撑，打破传统金融体制中的精英垄断，使民众广泛参与发展普惠金融。 央行：基本完成法定数字货币顶层设计、标准制定、功能研发、联调测试等工作央行发文《盘点央行的2019金融科技》。文中称，央行在坚持双层运营、M0替代、可匿名的前提下，基本完成法定数字货币顶层设计、标准制定、功能研发、联调测试等工作。扎实开展数字货币研究，跟踪研究数字货币国际前沿信息。

主要内容：报告：ETH、Tron和EOS占据了去年Dapp 98%的交易量；Ripple首席执行官再次强调无法控制XRP价格，再遭社区抨击；欧盟第5项反洗钱指令已正式生效，纳入加密服务提供商；硬件钱包多品牌产品遭淘宝集体下架；媒体：比特大陆AI团队裁员200余人，上百员工抱团拒签；中国证券报：区块链技术对金融行业的影响是天翻地覆的。 ETC Agharta硬分叉预计将于12日18点进行，仍有51.1%的节点未准备就绪etcnodes数据显示，按目前出块速度计算，ETC Agharta硬分叉时间约为2020年1月12日18：00。小葱查询数据发现，截至目前，48.9%的节点已准备就绪，51.1%的节点未准备就绪。 报告：ETH、Tron和EOS占据了去年Dapp 98%的交易量Dapp Review关于加密去中心化应用的新报告指出，2019年对dapp来说是个好年头，对Tron和ETH来说尤其好。报告指出，去年，Tron、EOS和Ethereum在dapp上积累了230亿美元的交易量，在此过程中，Tron超越了EOS，成为事实上的dapp娱乐网络。随着加密经济的发展，领先的智能合约网络所扮演的角色也发生了变化。Ethereum已经从ICO转向了defi, Tron已经成为了赌博应用领域最杰出的dapp，EOS己处于两者之间。在加密领域，Ethereum、Tron和EOS占据了dapp所有交易总量的98%。（bitcoin.com） 交易所CobinHood或将关闭，曾被质疑为“退出骗局”CobinHood在一封发给用户的通知中表示，它正在审计所有账户余额并迁移数据。它将于2020年2月10日重新开放。然后，交易所将向所有用户发送关于取款过程的电子邮件，然后允许用户取回他们的余额。与此同时，CobinHood还敦促用户不要进行存款。据悉，该交易所在开曼群岛注册，但总部设在中国台湾。据了解，去年年初，该交易所出售了母公司DEXON Foundation的DEXON代币，不到一个月就筹集了350万美元。后来，该公司在2019年5月申请破产。因此被投资者质疑为“退出骗局”。（CoinGape） Ripple首席执行官再次强调无法控制XRP价格，再遭社区抨击Ripple首席执行官Brad Garlinghouse在接受CNN的采访时再次强调，由于XRP的去中心化，Ripple无法控制XRP的价格。Brad的言论再次遭到社区抨击，加密货币分析师Tone Vays发推称：“我以前说过，以后还会说。Ripple声称他们的欺诈币XRP是去中心化和不可控的，但如果伊朗和朝鲜开始使用Ripple作为全球货币和价值转移方式，只需要美国当局打个电话给Garlinghouse，这个shitcoin就没了。” Kik再次请求法院审判美国SEC关于ICO一案的指控Kik(再次)请求在与美国SEC关于ICO一案的法律纠纷中接受审判，Kik希望对美国证券交易委员会(SEC)的指控进行审判，该委员会指控该公司在2017年的kin代币销售中进行了未经注册的证券发行。美国证券交易委员会周四提交了最新的诉讼进展情况，提供了初步的诉讼日程安排，并详细说明了双方安排其余部分作证的计划。（coindesk） Telegram称需要5至7周时间收集美国SEC所要求的代币销售相关信息Telegram表示需要五到七周时间来收集美国证券交易委员会（SEC）所要求其代币销售的有关信息。Telegram的律师事务所Skadden称，SEC的请求涵盖了12个国家和地区的770个个人和实体。而自9月以来Skadden只能审查76个实体，还需要更多时间来审查所有实体。(theblockcrypto) 欧盟第5项反洗钱指令已正式生效，纳入加密服务提供商欧盟第5项反洗钱指令（5AMLD）已于1月10日生效。5AMLD首次通过包括虚拟货币法币交易所或托管钱包提供商在内的加密服务提供商来扩大其监管范围。欧洲的加密货币公司正努力满足5AMLD提出的新监管准则。由于新法律要求了广泛的了解您的客户（KYC）和反洗钱（AML）程序，许多企业正在关闭。 硬件钱包多品牌产品遭淘宝集体下架比特派钱包发微博称，目前市场上所有品牌的区块链硬件钱包均已遭淘宝下架，包括BITHD、Cobo等品牌在内的产品均显示“宝贝不存在”、无法购买。此前，淘宝新增加了“区块链技术产品”二级类目，该类目下可以上架“带宽共享设备”和“数字货币硬件钱包”两类商品，即目前主流的数字加密货币硬件钱包可以在淘宝系统内上架销售。然而不到一个月的时间，此类产品便遭平台集体下架。 媒体：比特大陆AI团队裁员200余人，上百员工抱团拒签媒体向多位比特大陆相关业务线员工了解到，其AI团队将从360人裁到100人，从地域分布看，成都、武汉、上海和深圳的AI团队近乎“团灭”；从业务线看，100余人的服务器团队将被直接砍掉。同时，有200余名被裁员工因不满公司“N+1和期权，无承诺的13薪和保底年终奖”的赔偿方案，拉起维权群抱团拒签。但裁员指标和截止日期已定，公司以“现在不签，明天赔偿更少”相挟，无奈下签离职协议的员工越来越多。（星球日报） 中国证券报：区块链技术对金融行业的影响是天翻地覆的1月11日，中国证券报刊文“人工智能和区块链重塑未来金融形态”。文章表示，区块链技术对金融行业的影响是天翻地覆的。首先，在金融交易数据方面，存放在区块链系统中的数据安全性更高，区块链技术本身能够有效保证交易数据的安全性和真实性。区块链技术去中心化的特征，可以使数据更加透明，从根本上解决大量数据在第三方金融机构集中和形成信息孤岛的问题。其次，区块链技术本身不仅能够实现数据信息的永久性存储，而且能够通过对数据增加附加信息来实现数据信息归属的标识和产权的确认，这种机制能够有效地解决大数据共享与隐私保护之间的内在矛盾。这意味着每个个体都可以拥有自己的数据资产，这些数据资产同样可以带来相应的信用和其他衍生价值。最后，区块链技术依赖程序算法，实现公开透明的交易规则，使所有参与节点能够自动运行，共同维护，共同进行信用支撑，打破传统金融体制中的精英垄断，使民众广泛参与发展普惠金融。 央行：基本完成法定数字货币顶层设计、标准制定、功能研发、联调测试等工作央行发文《盘点央行的2019金融科技》。文中称，央行在坚持双层运营、M0替代、可匿名的前提下，基本完成法定数字货币顶层设计、标准制定、功能研发、联调测试等工作。扎实开展数字货币研究，跟踪研究数字货币国际前沿信息。

Today Ashton Addison with Eventchain.io joins us to discuss how blockchain can keep your tickets safe at events. Ashton has been involved in the blockchain industry since 2013, through the initial rise of Bitcoin price and the lead up to the Ethereum ICO. As the CEO and Founder of EventChain, he pioneered the team through a successful tokensale in September of 2017. He also advises various other Blockchain companies globally including Syscoin and CoinPayments.net in Canada, Pundi X in Indonesia and SmartMesh in China. Together with EventChain and his associated blockchain projects he has helped raise over $50M cumulatively. Ashton is a broadcaster on Reuters Insider Financial Network, focusing primarily on the Blockchain and FinTech industry. He founded the online FinTech and digital currency news broadcasting networks Crypto Coin Show, FinTech News Network, Blockchain Interviews, Blockchain top 5 and is considered a Key Opinion Leader in the Blockchain industry. He has extensive crypto community support on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. View this episode on our website here. *Disclaimer. None of this information is financial advice. ~ Want to learn more about cryptocurrency? Check out our blog today! ~ Follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Discord, Minds.com, Steemit, and Uptrennd today! ~ Stay up to date with the latest news in cryptocurrency by opting-in to our newsletter! You will receive daily emails (M-S) that are personalized and curated content specific to you and your interests, powered by artificial intelligence.  ~ We host various events around the New Orleans area. If you are in town come out and join us! ~ Are you an accredited investor looking to invest in cryptocurrency? Check out Crescent City Capital. ~ Want access to a hand-researched database of over 7,000 companies & people in crypto? CryptoList has what you're looking for! ~ We hope you are enjoying our cryptocurrency and blockchain educational content! We greatly appreciate donations, which all go directly towards creating even better educational content. Thank you for your generosity! BTC: 3BpSmgS8h1sNtbk6VMiVWxoftcwBxAfGxR   ETH: 0x743c0426CE838A659F56aFC4d3c10872d758EC79   LTC: MKCpf3qEVfT6yprhDhkJJcdNpqh5PZXSbx

In Episode 38 of The Bull Pen Podcast, The Crypto Bully steps into the Bull Pen with a unique individual who goes by Vicious aka Bitcoin Stoner. Discovering crypto early on and having the opportunity to invest in the Ethereum ICO based on a hunch proved to be one the best decisions ever made after checking in on Ethereum’s prices a few years later. This then started a roller coaster ride of emotions and a learning lesson that Vicious would never forget. After experiencing tremendous gains, unbelievable losses and moments of deep depression, Vicious made it through the market’s ups and downs coming out with a sharper mind, stronger emotional IQ and most importantly...a game plan for the next alt coin season. Show notes: Timestamps 00:00:00 – Preview 00:00:24 – Disclaimer 00:01:11 – Intro 00:02:00 – Interview 00:54:48 – Outro Where To Find The Crypto Bully Twitter: https://twitter.com/1cryptobully Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LyndonMorganII LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lyndon-morgan-ii/ Snapchat: https://www.snapchat.com/add/mrchangethewrld Where To Find The Bull Pen Podcast Website: http://thebullpenpodcast.io Discord: https://discord.gg/gNHJUN5 Steemit: https://steemit.com/@bullpenpodcast DTube: https://d.tube/#!/c/bullpenpodcast Musicoin: https://musicoin.org/nav/artist/0xb6dbbb7210cc5dd82fac57a56d25751c4637a98b Choon: https://choon.co/artists/1bullpenpodcast/ SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/1bullpenpodcast Twitter: https://twitter.com/1BullPenPodcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/1bullpenpodcast/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/1bullpenpodcast LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thebullpenpodcast YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPyp6_riQh7UtSdycvLp9TQ Where To Find Our Partners and Biggest Supporters The Bitcoin Podcast Network: https://thebitcoinpodcast.com/ ECC: https://ecc.network/ Satoshi Media Group: http://satoshimedia.group/ MARKNetwork: https://www.mark-network.com/ Blockchain Management Group: https://bmgroup.io/ Block Society: https://blocksociety.net If you're a blockchain and/or cryptocurrency enthusiast or influencer and want to be featured on The Bull Pen Podcast feel free to contact The Crypto Bully at info@thebullpenpodcast.io for inquiries.

Bitcoin, Ether und andere Kryptowährungen haben Investoren 2017 ebenso mit satten Kursgewinnen verwöhnt wie diverse ICO. Doch wohin geht die Reise 2018? Welche technologischen und regulatorischen Entwicklungen werden an Bedeutung gewinnen? Wer 2016 oder Anfang 2017 in Kryptowährungen eingestiegen ist, konnte sich zum Jahreswechsel über satte Kursgewinne freuen. Das vergangene Jahr brachte die Blockchain als Technologie dank dieses Kursfeuerwerks und einiger sehr erfolgreicher Initial Coin Offerings in den Fokus der breiten Öffentlichkeit. Platzt die Bitcoin-Blase 2018? Mittlerweile gibt es kaum ein Unternehmen und kaum einen Konzern, der nicht „irgendwas mit Blockchain“ macht oder machen will. Wenn 2017 also das Jahr war, das der Blockchain, Bitcoin und anderen Kryptowährungen zum ersten Durchbruch verholfen hat, wird 2018 dann zum Jahr der breiten Adaptierung mit stabileren Preisen und mehr praktischen Anwendungsfällen? Oder wird 2018 das Jahr, in dem die so oft beschworene Blase platzt? Online-Redaktionsleiter Sébastien Bonset spricht mit Julian Hosp von TenX im aktuellen t3n Podcast über diese Fragen. Darüber hinaus geht es um mögliche regulatorische Maßnahmen für Kryptowährungen und ICO, welche Staaten sich als Vorreiter der noch jungen Technologie hervortun könnten, welche Technologien die Blockchain 2018 beflügeln könnten und warum dezentrale Börsen immer wichtiger werden. Außerdem gibt es einen kurzen Jahresausblick für fünf unterschiedliche Währungen und ob diese sich eher „bullish“ oder eher „bearish“ entwickeln werden.

A new week, a new scam: A cryptocurrency start-up has dissapeared into thin air. Meanwhile Facebook is banning all advertisements for cryptocurrency, including Bitcoin and initial coin offerings. Companies like Square and Samsung are introducing new ways of trading and mining with Bitcoin. South Korea officially ends the current practice that allowed for anonymous trading of cryptocurrencies. Bitfinex and Tether are being subpoenaed by the CFTC. A very popular messaging app in Japan is launching a cryptocurrency exchange. And finally Venezuela announces their Ethereum ICO.