The Outlier Ventures Podcast

Aleksander cofounder of Axie Infinity talks about how they built the number one blockchain game in the world, now experiencing exponential growth, the design thinking beyond its tokenomics and governance and why they started with community over platform. We discuss considerations in designing for a digital economy, built around play-to-earn, how to balance and reward productive capital and work in the system, and if you get it right, the power of financial inclusion.             

Robby Yung is CEO of Animoca Brands, a leading mobile gaming studio and publisher who have millions of users and a raft of licensing partnerships with major brands globally. They pivoted their business entirely to blockchain when they became convinced it enabled an entirely new category of gaming they call ‘Meta Games’ based on powerful in game economies that combine NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) and DeFi (Decentralised Finance) and flip the classic game distribution model. Since then they have partnered and invested in Crypto Kitties, DApper Labs, F1 Delta Time and Sandbox establishing themselves as the leading blockchain gaming company.   We talk about release schedules, content economics and the idea of multiverses. 

We discuss the importance of AMMs (Automated Market Makers) and DEX (Decentralised Exchanges) to crypto, especially the role of Balancer Smart Pools to allow for price discovery and the bootstrapping of liquidity for new token projects. We discuss the unstoppable nature of DeFi, how to design or at least accommodate for its attack vectors, flash loans as a feature, and how the world of DEXs will interact with CEXs (Centralised Exchanges) long-term. 

Aaron is a law professor, serial founder and CEO of Open Law, the project behind The LAO (Legal Autonomous Organisation) which pioneered a DAO with a ‘legal wrapper’ to reduce and manage liability and risk for operators. The LAO now functions as an investment vehicle for several prominent Web 3 Founders, as well as advisors to the Moloch and Flamingo DAOs. He describes applying open source principles to legal contracting, machine readable ricardian smart contracts, the extent to which ‘code is law’, as well as considerations around arbitration and jurisdiction selection, and how he believes DAOs are the perfect expression of an intermediary light private ordering of wealth, and more than that, improved systems to collectively process and respond to information.              

As a serial entrepreneur Matt has two decades of scaling cloud infrastructure selling his first company in 2016 which at its peak was handling 1% of all UK web traffic. During that time he saw huge inefficiencies in both how new cloud infrastructure was being built and operated, founding Cudo to bring The Cloud to blockchain, designed to offload any kind of compute to a distributed network of idle machines from crypto mining rigs, south korean gaming cafes through to major partnerships - owners of AMD chips and The Playstation Network. This allows people and organisations to maximise a return on their investment into hardware, whilst reducing The Cloud’s carbon footprint by removing the need to build more data centers, as well as the power of edge computing for streaming services, gaming and AR.     

Gilbert is a serial entrepreneur and pioneer of Privacy Tech for over two decades advising large corporations, advertising agencies and governments on data ethics and their execution, exiting his first startup to the leading Priv Tech Unicorn, One Trust. At TapMyData he is taking The Trust Economy mainstream, repurposing and making usable digital asset infrastructure like crypto wallets and exchanges to enable end users to take back control and monetize their data whilst allowing for secure data dialogue with organisations around data rights building the largest set of data request information in the world. We discuss how The Data Trade was born out of cookie technology giving rise to Surveillance Capitalism and why it is now facing an extinction level event with regulations like GDPR turning data into a liability rather than an asset.

We talk to Dominic Williams CEO of DFinity about his vision for 'The Internet Computer', inspired by the Ethereum world computer, but fundamentally architected in a different way to allow for what he calls Open Internet Services: the ability for entrepreneurs and coders to build applications directly into the internet to remove dependencies on AWS, for truly unstoppable code. We explore his journey as a founder through all three web cycles building distributed systems and how Web 3 can allow for secure economic structure without firewalls, and more resilient to black swan events.  

Yaniv, co-founder of The Graph Protocol, talks about the importance of making sure the full Web 3 stack is as decentralised as possible, the indexing and querying of data, and how The Graph as a solution also removes the burden for DApp builders of hosting their own data infrastructure - therefore ultimately improving the DApp user experience to a Web 2 equivalence. 

We talk to one of the legendary founding fathers of the internet Mark Miller, about his 40+ year career as leading researcher at Xerox PARC, Google, Xanadu, core contributor to Javascript and creator of the ‘E’ Language. We discuss how he was inspired in the 80s by the economist Hayek’s ‘utility of property rights’ and object oriented programming to found Agorics (in ‘94) to create secure distributed computing markets to lower the risk of cooperation. We also discuss the history of smart contracts, and why in 2018 he rebirthed Agorics as Agoric to make smart contracts more secure, and accessible to developers. 

We talk with Tascha Punyaneramitdee (Pan Pan) about Alpha Finance Lab’s, Bangkok-based, DeFi Studio and how they identify, appraise and execute upon opportunities for new DeFi products, whilst managing risk. We also look at how they, as an early stage company, engage with the spectrum of institutions, from Binance and their BNB chain, through to their collaboration with SCB 10 x - the venture arm of a local retail bank.