This is probably our most in-the-weeds web3 episode yet. If you’re newer to crypto, we recommend you scroll back through your feed and listen to any of our episodes with Patrick Riera, Cooper Turley, and several others to give yourself a background to enjoy this one fully. As a bonus, you can also listen to our episode with Stephen Sikes from Public to build a background in traditional finance.

Joining Marshall this week in the Deep End is Barrett. Marshall introduces Barrett by first name only because, like past guest Bored Elon Musk, he is operating relatively pseudonymously. Barrett is one of the core contributors behind the Cypher Protocol.

Cypher is a futures protocol built on the Solana blockchain that wants to bring a new set of traditional finance opportunities to decentralized finance. They are doing this at a time when crypto users are quickly acclimating to concepts and tools traditionally used by Wall Street

We discuss this collision of crypto and “tradfi,” what a synthetic good is, the analogs for IDOs and pretoken markets, and end with discussion on culture differences between web2 and web 3 companies.

A quick note: another core contributor to the Cypher Protocol named Izzy had originally planned to sit in on the episode recording just to listen. But after she chimed in with an interesting aside to Barrett, we decided to actually bring her fully on stage and into the conversation. So you may not hear her at the beginning, but we’re thrilled that she joined to provide the nuance that she did.

For full show notes, links, RSVPs to live podcast recordings and more, visit thedeepend.substack.com