The DeFi Decoded Podcast

Happy New Year! On today's episode of DeFi Decoded, Andrew and Alex discuss the situation with Solana. The prominent Layer 1 blockchain was heavily backed by disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankamn Fried. Solana was once dubbed an Ethereum killer and at its zenith had a market capitalization of $70 billion. Today it is fighting for its survival. Andrew explains why the current collapse, while painful, could set up Solana for a new era of more sustainable growth, so long as it can survive in the short term. Then, Andrew gives us his top three predictions for 2023. What are they? Tune in to find out.

On this episode of DeFi Decoded, Alex and Andew sit down with Tom Dunleavy, Senior Research Analyst at Messari. 2022 was crypto's annus horribilis so they start with post-mortem for a challenging year. There were some huge setbacks, notably the collapse of FTX and other centralized exchanges and lending platforms, but also several major breakthroughs, such as the Ethereum Merge. Next, they discuss the outlook for 2023 and talk about core themes for investors, users, and builders in 2023, including the rise of app-chains, Web3 gaming, enterprise adoption, distributed physical infrastructure (DE-PIN), the future of layer 2's and competing layer 1's, and preview Messari's Crypto Theses report, which will be released before year-end.

Hollywood screenwriter Jesse Nickson-Lopez has brought some of modern TV's most indelible characters to life. As a founding member of the writing team on Stranger Things, she developed the storyline for the character Eleven and has written for The Outsiders, Narcos: Mexico, and other hit shows. Her next project, Lucia, will be directed by Damian Chazelle, the Academy Award-winning director of La La Land and Whiplash. At age 35, she has a résumé most writers aspire to. Despite her success, she considers screenwriting her day job. By night, she is the co-ounder of Web3 startup MV3. At the intersection of storytelling and technology, MV3 promises to disrupt TV, film, and the Hollywood business model itself. In this episode of DeFi Decoded, Alex and Andrew chat with Jesse and MV3 co-founder Torey Kohara about how Web3 can reimagine storytelling and the business of entertainment.

On this week's episode of DeFi Decoded, Alex and Andrew talk about OpenAI's smash hit Chat GTP and how Andrew is using it to unlock new capabilities, debug software and accelerate the growth of SX Network. On the topic of SX, Andrew gives us a sneak peek into the roadmap for the SX Network Merge, and shares his vision for how prediction markets can help solve big problems, manage risk and support new governance models. But before all that, Alex tells us about his recent trip to Turkey where he was the keynote speaker at the Turkish Capital Markets Congress. Plagued by inflation many in Turkey have chosen crypto as an off-ramp. Alex was very impressed by the working knowledge of Web3 in many of the country's leading financial firms. The future of Web3 in Turkey looks bright!

WBTC and WETH have both been in the news recently. Though they have similar sounding names, they are different in both composition and utility. WBTC is an Ethereum-based token (known as ERC-20) issues by BitGo, backed by Bitcoin. It allows users to use Bitcoin on the Ethereum network. Frequent listeners will recall that Mike Belshe, CEO of BitGo, joined us on a previous episode where he told us about BitGo's custody business. WETH is also an ERC-20 token, but in this case, it is backed by ETH rather than Bitcoin. Also, unlike WBTC, the collateral for wETH is held in a smart contract, not with a company. wETH allows users to use ETH more easily in DeFi and other Web3 applications. On this episode Andrew and Alex discuss the origins, use-cases and risks of these products and what they tell us about where Web3 is today.

On today's episode of DeFi Decoded, Alex and Andrew discuss some of the steps centralized exchanges (CEXes) can take to restore user trust. These solutions split into the "fiat variety" such as better governance, stronger regulation and regular audits and "on-chain variety" such as proof-of-reserves and proof-of-solvency. They also discuss the ongoing fallout from FTX which has engulfed crypto lender Genesis and had a knock-on effect with the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust and discuss how asset management giants Apollo and Hamilton are embracing tokenized securities.

On this week's episode of DeFi Decoded, Alex and Andrew sit down with Mike Belshe, Founder and CEO of BitGo, one of the world's leading firms in institutional staking, custody and trading firms, holding over $20 billion for some of the world's largest cryptoasset investors and many companies. Mike gives his perspective on the collapse of FTX, adding a few sensible recommendations for what industry leaders can do to prevent the "next FTX." He tells us why he's super bullish on DeFi but also why we will still need trusted third parties like BitGo in the future. Andrew and Alex mostly just listen as Mike gives a masterclass on how to run a digital asset business safely, sustainably and with an eye for future growth.

FTX, a top global exchange that counts supermodel Giselle Bundchen as a spokesperson, and was once valued at over $30 billion USD, is on the brink of collapse following a historic liquidity and solvency crisis that left the company scrambling to raise capital or sell itself to rivals. Founder SBF, who we once compared to J. Pierpont Morgan for his role as lender of last resort during the Summer 2022 lending crisis, has himself succumbed to the hubris and poor risk management that sent the industry into turmoil this year. Today, we stand on the brink of a long, bleak crypto winter. Will crypto emerge from FTX's collapse with a renewed commitment to trustless, decentralized tools? Or will we end up with an effective monopoly with one too-big-to-fail business in Binance dominating the market? Andrew and Alex give their best shot at predicting where we go from here.

On this week's episode of DeFi Decoded, Alex and Andrew sit down with Jack Zampolin, Co-founder of Sommelier, and former Product Manager at Tendermint. He's no Doctor, but the Strangelove Ventures founder has breathed life into several Cosmos's most well-known applications such as Akash Network, where he was also product manager. This "Jack of all trades" now has his sights set on cross-chain implementation of IBC, starting with Polkadot. Jack tells us about his investment thesis for Cosmos, why a portfolio approach is best, and why he thinks most of the killer apps on Cosmos and in Web3 generally are yet to be built. He may try to build them all!

Cosmos is highly regarded in the Web3 world for its novel and robust design, which allows developers to launch application specific chains while benefiting from the shared architecture of the Cosmos "Hub." For example, dYdX, the popular DeFi derivatives platform, recently migrated from Ethereum to Cosmos, citing a desire to be masters of their own fate. However, ATOM, the token most people associate with Cosmos, has never properly gotten its due, languishing outside the Top 20 cryptoassets behind Litecoin and Shibu Inu. The Team at the Cosmos Hub want to change that by making ATOM a key rallying point for the ecosystem, which they hope will lead to greater value capture at the token level and improve the overall state of Cosmos. On this episode, Alex and Andrew speak to Sam Hart, Strategy lead of the Cosmos Hub and the lead author of the ATOM 2.0 whitepaper on this vision for an ATOM-centric future.