In this week’s episode I interview Fred Chesnias, the CEO of Atari.  The video game company now has a token and plans to release a wallet and even an exchange.   The token is an erc20, which Atari hopes will get used across any game, not just their own.   With the token, users will be able to buy Atari NFTs, which include wearables to make a fashion statement in the metaverse. Fred believes blockchain and crypto can be a way to make it out of poverty, even leveraging video games themselves, reselling avatars and in-game items. Beyond blockchains he also talks about business; Chesnias was able to take Atari out of deep financial stress and turn it around. He gives advice to founders and business owners going through difficult times. One of the three main lessons he learned was to oversimplify. Listen to find out what else!

In this week’s episode, I speak with Robert Sharratt, managing director at CrescoFin, a Swiss-regulated crypto firm which wants to become a bank alternative. He says Cresco’s objective is to replace banking with code. And while that sounds revolutionary, he’s the first to admit he’s in a “boring business.” He’s not building a yield farming platform that can get you 1,000x yield. He’s building a savings account that’s backed by real-world assets like invoices, for users to deposit fiat currency in exchange for returns of about 3%. Instead of Yolo-ing into untested smart contracts, he’s offering a product that’s insured by Lloyd’s of London. While this may sound a lot like trad-fi, Ethereum smart contracts are used as the one source behind it all.

In today’s episode I talk with Jeff Garzik, the Bitcoin core developer turned DeFi builder.  Jeff comes from leading Bloq, a blockchain infrastructure company focusing on enterprises. As much as decentralized finance is exciting and groundbreaking, he believes its lacking professionalism. Jeff believes DeFi needs to be easy for retail users and for institutional users, not just for crypto natives. With that goal in mind, Bloq is launching Vesper, a decentralized protocol for users to gain passive interest on their crypto. The innovation relative to other yield bouncers, is that users can pick a risk level and the protocol will invest in different strategies accordingly. It both competes with, and uses Yearn Finance. We also talked about what’s next for DeFi, and how he believes the space will trend towards “hybrid finance,” where traditional finance will progressively adopt this infrastructure to become more open and global.

In this week’s episode I speak with Stefan George, the cofounder and CTO of Gnosis. Gnosis is one of the OG Ethereum projects. It was founded in 2015 by Stefan and Martin Koppelman as a prediction market platform on Ethereum and it’s now an ecosystem of financial applications, with a decentralized multi-sig wallet, called Gnosis Safe, and a decentralized exchange. Most recently, Gnosis announced it will join other DeFi projects and launch a DAO, where it would transfer a large chunk of the ether and GNO tokens in its treasury for the community to manage. This treasury is sizeable at around $100M dollars, due to the rising price of the 250,000 ETH they raised in a 2017 ICO. And this stash has been the core of a dispute with one of Gnosis token holders, hedge fund Arca. Arca claims the Gnosis token is trading below the value of the Gnosis treasury, and so they have proposed that Gnosis buy back their tokens at a value that’s between the current market value and the value of the treasury —or the book value. Stefan argues the GNO market cap is miscalculated because it’s not counting the actual number of tokens in circulation and should be higher. He also says the Gnosis DAO should drive more value to GNO holders.

In this week’s episode I speak with E.G. Galano, cofounder of Infura, an infrastructure provider for Ethereum and other blockchains. Many Ethereum applications depend on Infura to run their nodes, and it became apparent why that’s problematic recently, when the service provider was having trouble connecting to the Ethereum blockchain, causing much of DeFi to break down. E.G. dives into the recent outage; he goes into what went wrong and what Infrua is doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again. He also talks about DeFi from the backstage perspective of an infrastructure provider, and what he says might get you feeling even more bullish on this space.

This weeks podcast episode is with Mona El Isa, the co-founder of Melon, a decentralized asset management protocol. Mona tells the story of how she started her career at Goldman Sachs trading equities, derivatives, and all kinds of financial instruments, for a decade. She then went to work with one of Goldman’s hedge fund clients, where she managed a long-short portfolio. With all that experience and $20 million dollars from a seed investor, she ventured on her own to launch a hedge fund —but failed. The time, costs and administrative hassle were too much to handle even with an investment of millions, which in that world, is actually pretty tiny. She came to the conclusion that the next step for her would be to build a blockchain-based protocol so that nobody would have to experience what she did when trying to set up an investment fund. A platform that made the process so much cheaper, faster and easier, that anybody could become a hedge fund manager. That’s how Melon Protocol came about.

In this week’s episode, I speak with Illia Polosukhin, cofounder of the Near Protocol and Fernando Martinelli, co-founder and CEO of Balancer Labs. Near is one of the up and coming Layer 1 chains, Balancer is a prominent DeFi protocol and application on Ethereum that will now also be on Near and other blockchains. As for Near being labeled an “Ethereum Killer” Illia says Near is “not trying to kill anybody.” He thinks finance is just a stepping stone for all the use cases enabled by blockchains and that Near can be the place where those consumer apps are built. Fernando says DeFi will live on many different Layer 1s, but he sees the space expanding into less than 10, not hundreds of chains. He remains very bullish on Ethereum and is betting on a flippening with Bitcoin in the near future, which Illia agreed would be “totally possible.”

In this week’s interview, I speak with Sam Bankman-Fried, co-founder and CEO of crypto liquidity provider Alameda Research and derivatives exchange FTX, and with Anatoly Yakovenko, the creator of the Solana blockchain. Bankman-Fried, recently announced the launch of Serum, a DEX built on the Solana blockchain. SBF has become known to be a ruthless trader, but he argues he’s simply using DeFi protocols for what they were made. For Anatoly, the end goal of Solana is to find the fastest and cheapest way to scale cryptography so that people are able to have ownership and participation in the applications they use, and so that the financial system can become more open efficient.

This week’s interview is with Trevor McFedries, who is behind Lil Miquela, a 19-year-old aspiring pop star with almost 3M Instagram followers, striking deals with Clavin Klein and Prada. But what’s more surprising is that she’s not human. She’s a computer-generated, character. The company that Trevor co-founded, called Brud, created her image and life story. It’s only fitting then that Lil Miquela, who lives in a digital world, will start to leverage digital tokens. [Note: Trevor says in the interview a Miquela drop on SuperRare would happen on Oct. 30 or 31, but they’ve since changed the date to November 17. So you’re still on time to participate.]

The founder of Summa speaks to The Defiant about why he has become disillusioned with decentralized finance. Stories of financial inclusion are much rarer than stories of somebody raising hundreds of millions in a token sale or people throwing money at the latest yield farming protocol. Still, he’s encouraged by the fact that it is much easier to launch a financial service than it ever has been before.