Talking blockchain, functional programming, and the future with Tezos co-founder Arthur Breitman

Talking blockchain, functional programming, and the future with Tezos co-founder Arthur Breitman

While blockchains are huge right now, finding one to build on that doesn’t use a ton of energy, has good privacy protections, and operates efficiently is harder than it looks. The original breakout blockchain, Bitcoin, was slow to adopt any innovations coming out of research. Other blockchains use the electricity of a small country to play elaborate gambling games. For someone looking to build the future of Web3, what are your options?

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk to Tezos co-founder Arthur Breitman. After finding out that the Bitcoin blockchain wouldn’t incorporate all the good ideas generated around it—proof of stake, privacy improvements, and smart contracts to name a few—he decided to build his own.

Arthur has a background in machine learning and statistics but spent his early 20s teaching self-driving cars how to turn left and working in quantitative finance for high-frequency trading. High-frequency trading was data-driven, but there was so much noise that machine learning didn’t do very well. Self-driving cars, meanwhile, presented a more structured problem, so neural networks could yield good results.

Around that time, Arthur got bit by the crypto bug. It lived at the intersection of a lot of his interests: Cryptography touched on computer science and math, but his time in finance got him wondering about banks and money work. The idea of individual sovereignty scratched a personal philosophical itch.

Naturally, Arthur decided to try some mining software. It took all of his computer’s resources, so he uninstalled it. But after seeing the price of Bitcoin break a dollar and other news items about it, he looked closer. He started to think about what a company could do if it didn’t have to maintain banking relationships. He thought about possible applications, like decentralized poker.

When Bitcoin refused to adopt the improvements developed by competing alt coins, Arthur started thinking about a new blockchain that would respond to new developments and focus on efficient processing, security, and a good smart contract system. Forking the code wasn’t enough; he needed a new ledger.

That’s when Tezos was born. It was initially built by a small team of OCaml programmers using that language’s functional subset. Arthur was inspired by the example of WhatsApp, which was built by a small team of senior Erlang engineers. While OCaml would limit the talent he could hire, it would be a very efficient way to build an error-free transaction system. He could have built the whole thing in Java, sure, but Arthur estimates that it would have cost a whole lot more.

If you’re interested in learning more about what an engineer’s blockchain ecosystem looks like, check out the Tezos home page. Discover building on Tezos: https://tezos.com/build/

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Episoder(888)

"My job is going to change in a dramatic way”: Exploring the future of the internet with Cloudflare

"My job is going to change in a dramatic way”: Exploring the future of the internet with Cloudflare

Dane shares his excitement about the Model Context Protocol (MCP), exploring its potential impact on the future of technology. The discussion turns to the growing need for sustainable content monetization and fair compensation for creators in an AI-driven world, and how this connects to Cloudflare’s mission to build a better internet.The conversation also: Explores how Cloudflare leverages AI internally to enhance developer productivity and improve code quality while keeping developers as owners of their work. Covers Cloudflare’s innovative organizational structure and their journey toward becoming an AI-first company. Episode notes: Connect with Dane on LinkedIn or X, and learn more about Cloudflare. Read more about Knowledge Solutions, a data licensing offering that provides continuous access to Stack Overflow’s public dataset. Learn more about creating a private instance of Stack Overflow for your team or org with Stack Overflow for Teams. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

19 Jun 23min

After 30 years, Java is still brewing up new features

After 30 years, Java is still brewing up new features

Connect with Georges on LinkedIn and see his work on inside.java.Listen to our previous episode with Georges, a celebration of Java’s 25th anniversary. Today we’re shouting out the age-old question What is a NullPointerException, and how do I fix it?, which was answered 31 times as a community effort.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

17 Jun 27min

“We’re not worried about compute anymore”: The future of AI models

“We’re not worried about compute anymore”: The future of AI models

Together AI is a platform for building with open-source and specialized multimodal models. Check out their docs.Connect with Jamie on LinkedIn.Shoutout to user aryaxt who earned a Stellar Question badge by wondering about MySQL Data - Best way to implement paging?.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

13 Jun 25min

Better vibes and vibe coding with Gemini 2.5

Better vibes and vibe coding with Gemini 2.5

Gemini 2.5 is DeepMind’s most advanced model yet, with strong reasoning and coding capabilities. Connect with Tulsee on LinkedIn.Connect with Logan on LinkedIn and Stack Overflow. Check out our previous episode with Logan, we discussed his unique path from coding to AI to product, the challenges of non-determinism in AI models, and surprising lessons from working at the Apple Store.Congrats to Populous badge winner Pascal MARTIN for answering the question PHP echo vs PHP short echo tags.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

10 Jun 33min

Banking on a serverless world

Banking on a serverless world

Explore how Capital One is using tech to innovate the banking experience here.Connect with Kathleen on LinkedIn and visit her blog. Shoutout to user Theraot for answering the questions How to connect a signal with extra arguments in Godot 4, which won them a Lifeboat badge.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

6 Jun 23min

If an attacker can edit your mobile code, how do you defend your app?

If an attacker can edit your mobile code, how do you defend your app?

SPONSORED BY GUARDSQUARELearn more about mobile application security and how to protect your app.Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Chitrakshi for rescuing TypeScript Error: No overload matches this call in Express route handler.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

4 Jun 28min

In a deterministic simulation, you can debug with time travel

In a deterministic simulation, you can debug with time travel

Antithesis is an autonomous testing platform that finds bugs in your software with perfect reproducibility.Connect with Will Wilson on Linkedin.Congrats to user hannes neukermans whose question How can I do tag wrapping in Visual Studio Code? won them a Stellar Question badge.Our 2025 Developer Survey is live! We want to know what your developer life is like!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

3 Jun 28min

Getting rid of the pain for developers on Shopify

Getting rid of the pain for developers on Shopify

Check out Shopify’s newest updates on their editions page, including Horizons and their new AI capabilities with Sidekick.Connect with Glen Coates on LinkedIn and X.Shoutout to Stellar Question badge winner nouptime for asking Converting string to byte array in C#.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

30 Mai 30min

Populært innen Business og økonomi

stopp-verden
dine-penger-pengeradet
e24-podden
rss-penger-polser-og-politikk
rss-borsmorgen-okonominyhetene
livet-pa-veien-med-jan-erik-larssen
pengepodden-2
rss-vass-knepp-show
finansredaksjonen
utbytte
tid-er-penger-en-podcast-med-peter-warren
okonomiamatorene
morgenkaffen-med-finansavisen
stormkast-med-valebrokk-stordalen
lederpodden
aksjepodden
rss-sunn-okonomi
rss-fri-kontantstrom
rss-andelige-tanker-med-camillo
rss-impressions-2