Why Is dYdX Ditching Ethereum?

This week’s interview is with Aragon co-founder Luis Cuende. Aragon is a platform for users to create their own decentralized autonomous organizations. DAOS are organizations that have as much of its operations put into code as possible, and have smart contracts execute those operations. Owners hold tokens of the DAO, much like owners of a company hold shares, and make management decisions by voting with those tokens. They’re as transparent, immutable and secure as the blockchains they run on. Aragon wants to make it easy for anyone to build these futuristic companies. Cuende started this project in 2016, at a time when most had given up on these organizations after the crash of what’s likely the most well-known DAO so far, called The DAO. The space has recovered and in the past year, thousands of DAOs holding millions of dollars have flourished. The dream of more fair and open organizations, which anyone can access and create, is back at a time when the world seems to really need them. People are losing trust in institutions and crypto can provide an alternative. But Cuende says he’s saddened to discover the space is nowhere near ready.

13 Juni 202053min

In this week’s interview I talk with Alexis Gauba, the cofounder of Opyn. Alexis and her team built the first decentralized options market, on Ethereum. These instruments give investors a tool to protect against market volatility and Black Swan events, like hacks, bank runs, and big price crashes. In DeFi the risk is especially high, which explains why Opyn has taken off since its February launch. Options are a key piece in traditional finance and make up the most liquid market in the world, with contracts representing trillions of dollars in value. Opyn contracts are not quite yet, and even if notional volume grew five times in the past month, it’s still under $40 million. But if DeFi ends up overtaking centralized finance, we could be witnessing the rebirth of this monster-sized market. The difference is that this time, everyone can access it, and anyone can build their own financial instruments on open sourced protocols. Alexis shares more about how Opyn was born, the project’s traction, the next markets the team plans to add and what innovative projects devs are building on top of the protocol. She also gives a peak at what Opyn V2 might look like.

5 Juni 202054min

This week’s interview is with Sergey Nazarov, the cofounder of oracle provider Chainlink. The way blockchain applications get their data has proven to be crucial, as failures in those systems have been at the core of many of the latest attacks in decentralized finance. He says developers are currently underestimating the complexities of building data aggregators and oracle systems and says, the only reason these dangerous patterns are not as discussed is because the losses have not been Mt. Gox level. In this conversation Nazarov makes the case on why the Chainlink platform is meant to help avoid those risks. We also talk about the main trends he’s seeing in the space, Chainlink’s plans for the coming months, and his vision for a more decentralized future.

30 Maj 20201h 2min

This week's episode is an interview with Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. We talked bout everything from crypto in the pandemic, to Facebook's Libra and stablecoins, to DeFi and their ETH holdings.

21 Maj 20201h 4min

This week’s interview is with Fernando Martinelli, co-founder and CEO of Balancer Labs. Balancer Labs is an AMM with a twist. Instead of liquidity providers having to deposit tokens in a pool at a pre-determined ratio together with a more liquid token (usually ETH), Balancer enables users to create token pools that have any ratio they want between their tokens. They can use any combination of tokens, and can even exclude ETH. The pools automatically rebalance when tokens’ price change, so that the same ratio is maintained. This way, liquidity providers are effectively creating something like a tokenized index fund, or ETF, in which anyone can invest. On the other side of the protocols are the liquidity takers, or traders, who can exchange tokens from these pools, or “ETFs.” Traders pay a small fee, determined by liquidity providers, which means that unlike in traditional finance, where you have to pay ETF providers to trade index funds, you can create your own fund and get paid for it. Fernando explains how Balancer works, and gives the scoop on what’s coming up next, which includes, an interface for non-technical users to create their own token pools, a Balancer token to be launched in V2, liquidity provider rewards using this new protocol token, and plans for decentralized governance. He also talks about Balancer’s business model, the steps it took to ensure the protocol is safe and the level of control the team has over the protocol —which he says is basically zero.

15 Maj 202051min

Emin Gun Sirer is a Cornell University computer science professor who has been deeply involved in the Bitcoin and Ethereum communities from the very early days. We talk about how he got started in the field, building a cryptocurrency long before Bitcoin. Gun, as friends call him, then turned his attention to Ethereum, notably catching the bug in The DAO, but failing to alert the community about it. After years scrutinizing existing blockchains, he’s back at making one himself with AVA, whose testnet launched two weeks ago. He explains the inner workings of this network, the first built over the Avalanche protocol, and how it can process several thousands of transactions per second at latencies of under one second. He also talks about his plans to release a subnetwork called Athereum shortly after the AVA mainnet launches in July. Athereum will be almost identical to Ethereum; it will replicate its smart contracts and assets, and ETH holders will hold the equivalent amount of ATH. Sirer says the intention is for Athereum to serve as a safety net in case something goes wrong with ETH 2.0. If this sounds like Ethereum’s old friend wants to bring on some serious competition to the second-biggest chain, that’s because he is. Still, he’s quick to highlight he wants Ethereum to succeed and that he’s not after Ethereum dollars, but rather after money flows that are outside of Ethereum.

1 Maj 20201h 12min

Hello Defiers! This week’s interview is with MyEtherWallet founder and CEO Kosala Hemachandra. As the head of one of the most popular Ethereum interfaces, Kosala has a unique perspective on how the global pandemic has impacted activity. He also shared how coronavirus has disrupted his own life, and talks about what it’s like to run a company from his bedroom at his family’s home in Sri Lanka, on opposite timezones as the rest of his team. He also talks about how crypto was built for crises, about the importance of building a decentralized product —if it’s custodial, it’s not worth it— and what he believes the future of digital wallets will look like. Lastly, he told me about MEW’s next big projects: a DEX.

25 Apr 202042min

In this week’s episode we talk with Daniel Wang, CEO and founder of the Loopring protocol. The exchange built on the protocol launched a little over a month ago, with the goal of providing a non-custodial platform, meaning it allows users to keep control of their funds, with similar performance in throughput and cost as centralized exchanges. There’s mind boggling technology with funny names behind this protocol —zero-knowledge proofs, Snarks, Starks,— which Wang demystifies and explains. We talked about how scalability is a relative and not an absolute measure. To him that means Ethereum 2.0, an upgrade meant to increase the tractions per second on the network, won’t magically solve all scalability issues and Layer 2 solutions, which take part of applications’ data and computation off chain, will still be needed. To him though, users’ security is the wholly grail, and Ethereum is the best place to get it. Wang also lamented lack of accessibility to Ethereum dapps and dexes in China, and talked about Loopring’s plans to launch a smart wallet geared for the Chinese market which will hopefully help solve this problem. These are some of the key topics we discussed: Loopring origins and having to give back most ICO funds The team’s decision to go all-in on zero-knowledge proofs The protocol’s tradeoffs: more centralization for faster and cheaper transactions Why users should use non-custodial exchanges instead of centralized trading platforms Lack of access to Ethereum dapps in China and smart wallets as the gateway to mass adoption Ethereum dapps scalability issues and Layer 2 solutions with Eth 2.0

15 Apr 202047min