DeCent People

Ohm Shah is the co-founder and co-CEO of Wallet Guard which is trying to make the digital world of web3 safer and easier to use. He studied at Kent State University and got one of his first computer security jobs there. He went on to work at Accenture before co-founding Wallet Guard, which is a browser extension that scans for malicious web sites that want to drain your digital wallet. We talk about all of that, the mistakes Kevin Rose made in losing millions of dollars in NFTs and what it will take to get mass adoption in crypto. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Pat spent many years as the legislative counsel for derivatives firm ICAP and has more recently shifted his focus to cryptocurrencies and digital assets. Prior to that he served as staff to the Senate Agriculture Committee and helped write parts of the Dodd-Frank Act, which overhauled Wall Street in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The staff of his current advisory firm includes former regulators from the SEC and CFTC, where Pat served in both agencies as legal counsel. We talk about that rich history and his views on the current regulatory framework for digital assets. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Emin Gün Sirer is the CEO and founder of the Avalanche blockchain, the 16th biggest by marketcap. He grew up in Istanbul among a large extended family and attended the prestigious American High School there before coming to the U.S. for college. He was a professor of computer science for many years at Cornell University and was early to the game with both Bitcoin and Ethereum. We talk about family life in Istanbul, the strange TV show Musti and how cryptocurrency skepticism dates further back than 2008 and the release of the Bitcoin white paper. 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.

Ryan Breslow grew up in north Miami working jobs at his dad's driving range and bagging groceries at Publix, all the while graduating first in his high school class. He soon discovered Bitcoin and started the Stanford Bitcoin Club and had an idea for a payments startup that would eventually become Bolt, the "buy now" button service competing with Amazon that's valued at around $11 billion. His newest venture is Love DAO, a collective to help find and develop cures for diseases in a way that's outside the traditional pharmaceutical industry. This episode originally aired in September 2022See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jeff Milewksi is the CEO and co-founder of Glo Dollar, a stablecoin project that plans to donate all of its earnings to ease extreme poverty. Jeff is an economist who prior to Glo was a research director and instructor of fintech at Creighton University. We spoke about growing up in a small town in Iowa where his mom was a high school English teacher and his dad owned his own pharmacy, about Jeff's early love of econ and tech and about making the leap into running a start up after teaching DeFi classes at Creighton University. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Darius Tabatabai grew up in Wales, the son of pub owners who shockingly didn't take to football (rugby was his sport). His father instilled a betting instinct in him and a love of math helped Darius soon realize that he was very good at calculating the odds on various betting situations. He started his career in finance, trading currencies and metals before moving to crypto a few years ago. We spoke about lessons learned from the financial crisis of 2008, his time as a stand up comedian in London and his role as co-founder at decentralized exchange Vertex. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jim is the co-founder of Catalyst, a cross-chain protocol that is going into teting mode in a few months. He was previously held product roles at Aave, Unstoppable Domains and Ripple. We spoke about his childhood in Chicago and then San Diego, California and how a love an early desire to go into education tech eventually led him to web3. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

An art professor for twenty years, Jeff Davis is a generative artist and now Chief Creative Officer at Art Blocks. Seeking greater precision in his artwork, in 1999, he began to use design software to explore structures and colors to create digital art. Since then, he's been inspired by the use of technology for creative expression, building generative systems that explore form and color within specified parameters.. We spoke about his love of math, growing up outside Chicago, being a art professor for 20 years and his celebrated entry into the NFT art world and his role at formative NFT platform Art Blocks. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Joonatan Lintala is the CEO and co-founder of Phaver, a web3 social media platform that allows its users to retain control over what they post and adjust their privacy settings. We talked about Joonatan's upbringing in Finland, his early career in ad tech for firms like Google and how he wanted to do something more than sell ads for huge corporations. Phaver has a reward token users can earn and we talked about the ins and outs of that system in the current regulatory environment. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Neil Berkeley is the co-founder of Decential Media and a documentary filmmaker. Neil and I both attended ETHDenver, the largest and longest-running Ethereum conference, last week and we spoke about our experiences and how the conference has grown over the years. We also try to identify the pungent smell that filled the air outside the conference center. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.