"People Want me to be Popular, Not Necessarily Successful; That's the Trick with Personal Tokens:" Alex Masmej
In this week’s episode I speak with Alex Masmej, the first person to raise money by selling tokens not linked to any project, but linked to himself, in a sort of self-IPO. Much like shareholders taking dividends, Alex token holders can have a share of the entrepreneur’s future earnings. The money raised has helped him cover living expenses as he plans to move from Paris to San Francisco and start a tech company. He’s willing to try almost anything and see what sticks. In one of his experiments, he let ALEX holders vote on his daily habits, which is how he came to run 5km almost daily. Most recently, he announced token rewards in exchange for holders to add liquidity to exchanges where Alex is traded. We talk about how to better align token holders' incentives with his own, what mainstream personal tokens may look like, and the Black Mirrorish quality of it all.
15 Elo 202056min
"In DeFi My Money is Actually Mine. It's a Beautiful Concept But it Comes With Responsibilities:" Andre Cronje
Andre Cronje is the developer of the yearn platform and YFI token. There’s this sort of mysticism around Andre: The solo genius builder who relentlessly releases code even if it hasn’t always been properly audited or tested. The DeFi wizard capable of turning a token which he himself claimed to be valueless to be worth thousands of dollars in a few days. He talks about the actual paralyzing fear that comes with building money protocol, the huge responsibility he feels, and how finger-pointing has caused him to quit the space before. But he says the drive to continue innovating has helped him overcome that fear and keep building.
8 Elo 20201h 15min
"We're at the Early Stages of a Truly Novel Structure That can Organize Humans and Money:" Olaf Carlson-Wee
In today’s episode, I speak with Polychain Capital founder Olaf Carlson-Wee. He was already telling Wired magazine about programmatic finance back in 2016, so it’s no surprise Olaf is very excited about the growth and promise of DeFi. He thinks smart contracts are enabling different ways of organizing people and capital, turning traditional corporations into internet sovereign corporations. He believes that given a compelling underlying product, liquidity mining will be an incredibly effective mechanism for accelerating network effects, which will be applicable to many different types of business models even beyond financial services.
1 Elo 202053min
"Developers Will Wake Up to the Fact That There's a Toolkit to Build Full-Fledged Customized Chains:" Acala's Bette Chen
In this week’s epidose I speak with Bette Chen and Ruitao Su, who are building DeFi on Polkadot. While most of DeFi is being built on Etheruem, here is the team creating an entire new financial infrastructure on the decentralized network built by the Web3 Foundations and Parity Technologies —which was founded by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood. Their project called Acala, has been mostly known for its stablecoin, but they’re also building staking derivatives —a token that’s a derivative of staked DOT tokens and can be used in DeFi— and a DEX. Each one of these pieces is a huge undertaking on their own, but this ambitious team is making all of them at the same time.
25 Heinä 202059min
"Things Tend to Get Better. For Anyone Involved in Crypto, It's Obvious That This is 1,000x Better," 1kx's Lasse Clausen
In this week's episode, I speak with Lasse Clausen, founding partner of 1kx, one of the most active venture funds in DeFi. A typical VC question in the traditional tech space is it a 10x? Is it 10 times faster, better, cheaper? This concept has been dressed up very nicely as like, often with grand statements about making the world a better place, but really, Lasse says, VCs are subsidizing a market takeover. The real question they're asking is, can this become a national monopoly, where users are so locked in, that they have no choice but to use the product. Lasse thinks crypto will crack this system open and that the paradigm shift is so big that there will be some networks that are really 1,000x improvement over the status quo. That's why his fund is called 1kx.
18 Heinä 202052min
"Basic Financial Services is a 21st-Century Fundamental Human Need:" OMG Network's Vansa Chatikavanij
This week’s interview is with Vansa Chatikavanij , the CEO of OMG Network. The Bangkok-based project formerly known as OmiseGo has spearheaded research and work on a scaling technology for Ethereum called Plasma. Scaling solutions will be key for Ethereum and therefore DeFi, to continue growing. The network is already at capacity, and gas prices are getting prohibitively high, especially for complex DeFi transactions. In this interview we talk about OMG’s beginnings, the changes the project went through from conception until shipping, realizing that marketing should come after the project’s launch, and the different Ethereum scaling solutions. Most interesting to me is Vansa’s big vision of global value transfer as a basic human right and how she wants to help make that a reality.
11 Heinä 20201h
"All the Dizzying Ways People are Farming Yield is Proof of DeFi Composability's Success:" Ampleforth CTO
In this week’s interview, I spoke with Brandon Iles, the CTO of Ampleforth. Brandon is a former Google and Uber software engineer, and built his first crypto app together with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. Today, he’s trying to rebuild the way money works. For its huge ambitions, Ampleforth is a relatively little-known project. It wants to create an entirely new category of monetary assets — one that doesn’t have Bitcoin’s gold-like fixed supply, it doesn’t have Ether’s oil-like utility, it’s not fiat-backed like USDC, and it’s not collateralized like Dai. So what is it? It’s a token — AMPL— whose value comes from having a price which moves in a predetermined band, thanks to a smart contract which automatically contracts or expands its supply. The end result is a token that trades at close to $1, the 2019 US dollar, to be precise, but Ampleforth doesn’t like to be called a stablecoin —you're about to find out why. We also talked about the project’s recent liquidity mining program called Geyser, where traders can earn AMPL by supplying liquidity on Uniswap, and how for Brandon, the dizzying activity around these schemes is proof of DeFi’s success. Brandon also discussed the project’s roadmap, from being used as a way to diversify collateral in lending platforms like Maker and Compound, to denominating debt obligations, to very far out into the future, replacing central bank issued currencies.
27 Kesä 20201h 9min
DEX Progress to be a "Landmark Event" Over the Summer: Framework Ventures
This week’s interview is with Michael Anderson and Vance Spencer, co-founders of crypto venture fund Framework Ventures. Michael and Vance live and breathe crypto. The live together, work together, and spend all their time analyzing crypto startups, and actively participating in the protocols they fund. It’s how they’ve become some of the deepest thinkers in the space. They talked about how the emergence of token-based business models in the past year has been a breakthrough for crypto, legitimizing the space as a new asset class. they discussed how they determine whether a protocol will accrue value. Vance believes new developments in decentralized exchanges this year will drive 10% of centralized exchanges’ liquidity. Michael believes the hot new thing, governance tokens, are akin to early startup equity. They also talked about why they love the philosophy driving SNX and discussed why the underdog mentality of LINK Marines is bullish for Chainlink. But first, we’ll start with how they got into crypto in the first place.
19 Kesä 20201h 1min
