DeCent People

Alex Van de Sande was one of the first people in South America to devote himself to Ethereum in its very early days. He helped build Mist, one of the first browsers on the new blockchain and was instrumental in helping resolve the DAO hack that occurred in June 2016. He's since gone on to champion the Ethereum Name Service, or ENS.This episode originally aired in January 2023See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Nick Lambert, the CEO of Dock, a company providing decentralized digital identity solutions. Starting out with IBM and Sanmina-SCI, Nick moved into the decentralized space in 2011 with Scottish start-up MaidSafe and was their Chief Operating Officer for seven years. Nick is now the CEO of Dock Labs AG, the company behind the Dock network who has created Dock Certs, a platform that enables organizations to create and manage decentralized identities and verifiable credentials. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Richard Ma is the co-founder and CEO of Quantstamp, a web3 security company that has secured over $200B worth of digital assets for over 250 clients and performed more than 500 audits. Ma was a quant trader before co-founding Quantstamp. After losing Ethereum in the DAO hack in 2016, he was set on improving security in the Web3 space.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Erin Plante is the senior director of investigations and special projects at blockchain forensics firm Chainalysis. She's had a fascinating career in cyber security, including two stints in Hong Kong where she helped ferret out executives of Western corporations who may have been illegally bribing Chinese officials. Think clandestine, overnight work that imaged entire corporate digital libraries without leaving a trace. She also worked in Africa on corruption investigations where she first understood that cryptocurrency could alleviate the problem of migrant workers having to send bags of cash back to their families in other parts of the continent. At Chainalysis she's worked on fascinating investigations like combating Russian hackers who use the Bitcoin blockchain to ensure their malware never goes offline.This episode originally aired in March 2022.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Seth founded Bright Moments, an NFT gallery, in Venice, California at the height of the covid-19 pandemic. A serial entrepreneur and photographer, he quickly understood the power of non-fungible tokens but wanted the unveiling, or minting, of the digital assets to be a communal and in real life event. The response has been incredible and has now spanned quite a bit of the globe as Bright Moments has gone from Venice to temporary residences in New York, Berlin, London, Mexico City and Tokyo. This episode originally aired in November 2022See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We've got a special episode today as we bring you a recording of a Twitter Spaces we did that we called Crypto for Good. We spoke with three crypto projects that are focusing on changing the world for the better. Glo Dollar is a stablecoin project that is promising all of its profit to go to help end extreme poverty. Ecosapiens is an NFT project that allows retail users to buy carbon credits to help fight global warming. And Huma Finance is working on crypto loans that can help small to medium sized businesses around the world get access to capital that banks are unwilling to lend. Thanks to my colleagues Amanda Smith and Stephen Laddin for joining me on the Spaces discussion. Here are the Decential stories we've done on Glo Dollar, Ecosapiens and Huma in case you missed them.Crypto for Good: How Glo Dollar Plans to Use a Stablecoin to Help End Extreme PovertyEcosapiens Battle Climate Change by Offering Carbon Credits as NFTsFrom Facebook to ‘DeFi for the 99 Percent,’ Erbil Karaman and Huma Are Decentralizing AccessSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Oleksandr is a co-founder and chief product officer at Blink Finance. For the past 9 years, he worked as an algorithmic trader, portfolio and fund manager in the traditional finance and crypto space. We spoke about the war in Ukraine's impact on Blink, the pros and cons of under collateralized trading and what's its like to be a prime broker in the crypto world.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jack O’Holleran is co-founder and chief executive officer of SKALE Labs, the team behind SKALE, a blockchain that's designed for ultra-fast, secure, user-centric Ethereum scaling. Jack first started working with digital currencies in 2008 and we talked about his time playing first team football for the Nebraska Cornhuskers, how the Russian invasion of Ukraine affected Skale's development and how AI can help blockchain development. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Huf is the co-founder of Pear Protocol, a new decentralized exchange on Arbitrum that plans to offer trading pairs (get it?) of digital assets where one side of the trade is long and the other is short. He previously worked for 11 years on the trading floor for a large international investment bank, where his clients included some of the UK's largest asset managers and he specialized in equity derivatives and volatility markets. He went full time into DeFi in 2019 and we talk about the vast differences between traditional finance and the web3 version, about how crypto trades on narratives and how regulation is a major concern for projects such as Pear Protocol. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jason Shah is the head of growth at Alchemy, a web3 developer platform that powers most of the NFT market and a lot more web3 infrastructure. Shah previously led product teams at Airbnb, Amazon, and Microsoft and we spoke about the differences in web2 centralized firms and the decentralized goal of web3.Jason's personal web site jasonshah.me on Twitter @jasonyogeshshah or @0xShah.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.