The Outlier Ventures Podcast

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!

We speak with Henri, founder of Streamr, and serial entrepreneur in the data economy. We explore how his career in algorithmic trading in capital markets helped him understand the importance of ‘real-time data’ and why the promise of blockchain + IoT in domains like Smart Cities despite its early promise still hasn't happened. We ask if data policy like GDPR is already out of date with regards to blockchain and how policy itself, such as the EU Commission forcing open Big Tech data silos, can become the top down trigger for the Open Data Economy and how data unions can be a way for consumers to claim back control.

Dr. Gavin Wood needs no introduction. Cofounder and CTO of Ethereum, inventor of the Solidity programming language and now Founder of The Web 3 Foundation, Parity Labs, and the Polkadot network. We talk about his mission to re-decentralise The Web as a ‘free trust technologist’, giving the Internet native law, and how Polkadot is a bet against blockchain maximalism with a focus on ‘full agency’ for the network and its network of blockchains (parachains) to adapt and evolve with baked in governance. We also address how Polkadot could co-exist or compete with ETH 2, depending upon the pathway the Ethereum community chooses.

Michael O’Rourke is founder of Pocket Network, a decentralized API protocol, and marketplace. We talk about the history of node infrastructure in public blockchain networks, the problem of increasing centralisation and the importance of democratising the use of full nodes. We address; could Jeff Bezos switch off crypto via AWS (Amazon Web Services), due to its reliance on cloud infrastructure, why sustainable decentralised public blockchains need incentives like the POKT token, designing governance in the Pocket DAO, and the power of gamification.

Jordan is a serial founder, digital advertising and product designer that has a history of making digital viral hits. This time, he half-jokingly birthed a parody on the craziness of permissionless innovation in DeFi, ‘degen culture’ and the various food protocols of 2020. In the process, he started a crazy community experiment in collectibles and NFT (Non Fungible Token) food farming, which raises questions about the role and responsibility of a founder, at the edge of Web 3.

Hugh is a 15 year insurance industry veteran who launched Nexus Mutual, a decentralised insurance protocol, back in 2017 and, with the advent of DeFi, whose time has come. We talk about how insurance has historically enabled risk taking and innovation, forms of risk in DeFi, and how innovations in oracles & NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) make the industry unstoppable in delivering highly disruptive, bottom up, compliant by design, efficient and effective financial innovation.  

Justin, a physicist and seasoned executive from the loyalty industry (where he built a billion dollar unicorn), has developed a novel cryptographic game and foundational primitive for Web 3 using ‘stateful NFTs’, with some of the world’s leading game theorists, that removes the need for arbitration in the fulfilment of digital to physical redemption. We discuss NFTs as loyalty mechanisms, and how an emergent dCommerce Stack could one day unbundle Amazon.

Sebastien, a serial entrepreneur and gaming veteran talks about his vision for an Open Metaverse. Enabled by blockchain and new models, like play-to-earn, to allow economics between creator supply, user demand and virtual consumption. We discuss the idea of content-as-the-platform and user created, and owned, NFTs as virtual goods, how that interacts with DeFi (Decentralised Finance) and how it promises new levels of financial education, and literacy, to the next generation.