The Unstoppable Cryptocurrency Crisis in the US

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Abilab is a high-tech company that was using Silicon Valley Bank. It's not an exchange and they don't handle fiat anyway, so those failures did not affect us. So it doesn't affect us all that much in some sense and it affects us deeply in another sense. In general, as an entrepreneur in the US, I'm deeply rattled by what happened over there.

Welcome to Chain Reaction.

A show that unpacks and dives deep into the latest trends, drama and news with some of the biggest names in crypto breaking things down block by block for the crypto curious.

For this week’s episode, Jacquelyn interviewed Emin Gün Sirer, the founder and CEO of Ava Labs. Ava Labs created the layer-1 blockchain Avalanche, a platform that lets developers build Solidity-compatible multi-functional blockchains and dApps with a focus on speed and low transaction costs. Hundreds of projects are a part of the Avalanche ecosystem, ranging from decentralized exchanges like 1inch to digital asset security firms like BitGo.

Ava Labs has raised a total of about $640 million, according to Crunchbase and is backed by firms like a16z and Polychain Capital, among others. In recent months, Ava Labs has announced a number of partnerships with major brands and companies like Amazon Web Services, which TechCrunch covered exclusively.

We talked about Gün Sirer's background, why he launched the layer-1 blockchain, Avalanche, in 2020, whether the space has too many L1s and how blockchains can scale more efficiently.

We also discussed:

How the layer-2 vision is broken
U.S. regulatory crackdown on crypto
Ava Labs’ growth in Asian markets
The blockchain’s partnerships and business development
Ava Labs’ focal point for 2023 and beyond

Articles mentioned during the episode can be found here:

https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/11/aws-partners-with-avalanche-to-scale-blockchain-solutions-for-enterprises-governments/

https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/13/kkr-dives-into-avalanche-blockchain-to-tokenize-and-democratize-financial-services/

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Chain Reaction comes out every Thursday at 12:00 p.m. ET, so be sure to subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite pod platform to keep up with the action.