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.

We talk with Anatoly founder of Solona which claims to be the fastest unpermissioned blockchain in the world (without using sharding) and his 18 year career working as a senior engineer at Qualcomm, scaling distributed systems used by millions of people. We explore the ‘blockchain trilemma’, its history, and what he proposes is it’s false trade-off between security, speed and security and why by solving for the hard concept of ‘time’ and shifting focus to unlocking gains from hardware based on Moores Law could allow us to leapfrog the limitations of blockchains today and enable fully automated highly decentralised discovery markets for machines and the convergence of blockchain, mixed reality like AR / VR and AI. We discuss 5G and we ask him ‘can we ever have a fully decentralised censorship resistant Web 3?’ when state actors can control the physical infrastructure of the internet.  

Alex has made major contributions to OSS (Open Source Software) for over 20 years and launched HCAPTCHA, a CAPTCHA tool which now blocks malicious bots for more than 14% of the world’s traffic. What most people don’t know is that it is powered by Human Protocol, a knowledge marketplace leveraging crypto for 100m users worldwide, where machines post jobs for humans. We talk about how they’ve achieved a scale that could make them the most used DApp on the planet, privacy and the open knowledge economy, as well as the composable Open Data Stack that will power Web 3.      

To Celebrate our 50th Episode, we enjoy a joint podcast with Tor Bair, Founder of The Secret Network, and host of Sharing Secrets Podcast, where we first explore why privacy is important to both citizens and institutions in Web 3, and in particular DeFi, and how ‘Programmable Privacy’ is now possible across blockchains for both data and computation through ‘secret contracts’. The second part sees Tor interview Jamie on how Outlier Ventures has evolved over the last 7+ years and his learnings investing in Web 3 - coming to the Sharing Secrets Podcast soon: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sharing-secrets-presented-by-secret-network/id1438776388 To Celebrate our 50th Episode, join us at https://superrare.co/spongenuity as we auction off unique NFTs of the Top 10 most popular FOW3 guests, raising money for Computer Aid International!