The Delphi Podcast

Host Tom Shaughnessy leads a roundtable discussion with Yan Liberman (co-founder of Delphi Digital), Phil Bonello (former Head of Research at Ikigai), and David Puell (Head of Research at Adaptive Capital). They discuss the difficulties of crypto valuation, productive vs. unproductive assets, the differences between some projects, and more. Key Points It is very difficult to establish any intrinsic valuation of cryptocurrencies. Many strategies for short-term growth do not lead to long-term stability or sustainability. Tracking cryptocurrency growth and valuation has gotten more difficult as more transactions move off-chain. Episode Highlights Yan feels the token economy is the high-level understanding of the token structure, how the token accrues value, and how the token interacts within the ecosystem. Phil categorizes assets as either productive or unproductive. David thinks about the token economy in a way that includes game theory. Exchange tokens need to accrue value while also being a usable asset. The industry still relies heavily on operating in relation to the cost of Bitcoin, so it’s almost impossible to establish the fundamental value of anything. The “burn model” is not effective to extrapolate an intrinsic value. The “velocity problem” is that the more use of a currency there is, the less value it holds in the long term. Bitcoin avoids it by having a scarcity model. Maker tokens work as an incentive, but it requires considerable growth to outpace the burn rate. Now there is a token that you can use as collateral for synthetic assets, as a way to bootstrap your way to a sustainable value. It isn’t possible to make future projections without enough historical data of crypto value. Diversification and differentiation are big problems in crypto. At Ikigai, Phil didn’t avoid trading assets with low valuation but wanted to approach all trades with a full understanding of the function and model of the assets. Most agree that Bitcoin halvening is a bullish move. For Yan, it’s easy to say that a number of projects shouldn’t be in the top ten, but harder to say what should be in the top ten that isn’t. Resources Mentioned Chain Reaction Twitter: https://twitter.com/chainpodcast Tom Shaughnessy Twitter: https://twitter.com/Shaughnessy119 Yan Liberman Twitter: https://twitter.com/YanLiberman Phil Bonello Twitter: https://twitter.com/philjbonello?lang=en Phil Bonello’s blog: https://philjbonello.substack.com/ Adaptive Capital Website: https://adaptivecapital.co/ David Puell Twitter: https://twitter.com/kenoshaking?lang=en Support The Show Visit

Host Tom Shaughnessy talks to Akin Sawyerr a Strategy and Governance Lead for Decred. Akin discusses getting involved with the Decred platform, governance, and community-building. Key Points Decred is unique for its transparent, token-holder led governance. A community mindset of searching for the best solution to a problem increases transparency and decreases contention. Decred wants to build incrementally and develop iteratively in order to maintain a strong community and culture. Episode Highlights Africa is the most expensive area to move money. The free, open-source tech isn’t the issue, but the government network. Anyone in Decred’s network can propose, vote on, and debate ideas and feedback. There are pitfalls to token-holder governance, which is why Bitcoin doesn’t have it, but Akin sees it as giving the people with economic stake in the network and a stake in governance. Decred is working towards being a DAO, and using their cryptocurrency Politeia and technology built for Politeia in new implementations and new use cases. Decred is one of the only cryptocurrencies that hasn’t had a major PR scandal or problem arise. Decred’s biggest goals looking forward are to launch lightning support and a split-ticketing system. Akin believes Decred isn’t in the top 10 coins because it requires a bit of a learning and participation curve to get involved. Decred has the highest voter turnout for governance issues of all cryptos. Decred has a consistent philosophy about their protocols, down to having a constitution Resources Mentioned Delphi Digital's Research Chain Reaction Twitter Tom Shaughnessy Twitter Decred website Decred chat Decred Twitter Akin Sawyerr Twitter Previous Episodes Decred’s Co-Founder Jake Yocom-Piatt: Governance-First Crypto Aims to Challenge Bitcoin Noah Pierau on Blockchain Governance: Decred, Bitcoin, Dash, Ethereum Support The Show: $50 Off A Helium Hotspot Visit Delta Exchange For A $10 Welcome Bonus! Check out eToro to Create Your Perfect Crypto Portfolio Disclosures: This podcast is strictly informational and educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any tokens or securities or to make any financial decisions. Do not trade or invest in any project, tokens, or securities based upon this podcast episode. The host may personally own tokens that are mention

Host Tom Shaughnessy of Delphi Digital is joined by Alex Wearn, the co-founder and CEO of IDEX, a decentralized exchange built on Ethereum, to discuss the next version of the exchange and using optimized optimistic rollups to scale the exchange. Key Points IDEX tries to combine the design of a centralized exchange and the security of a decentralized exchange. The “optimized optimistic rollup” takes the most scalable aspects of different transaction settlement methods. There is a huge potential to bring other applications into the IDEX network to use the O2 rollup design. Topics Discussed IDEX 2.0 - UI improvements (faster and more performant) and a more efficient settlement process with rollups instead of settling each transaction one by one (IDEX users paid $5M in gas fees in 2018). IDEX differs from competitors (Uniswap etc) by having a high performant order book. An on-chain order book is great for integrations, but hard to use when replicating complex trading strategies.  In competing with 0x, IDEX disagrees that trying to have a high performant order book may be too difficult if its decentralized. How the different types of rollups work to drive scale for Ethereum, and the differences from normal rollups to IDEX's version called optimized optimistic rollups. Optimized Optimistic rollups can drive much higher throughput vs using traditional rollups.  How IDEX grew to been the most successful DEX and dapp to date, with over 300k users executing five million trades worth over $2 billion. The use of optimized optimistic rollups beyond IDEX, such as in gaming. Alex's thoughts on the battle between centralized exchanges (Coinbase, Binance, Bitmex, Delta) vs Decentralized exchanges (IDEX, Uniswap, 0x, etc). Episode Highlights: IDEX aims to build a highly performant, yet safe and secure decentralized exchange; they want to create a centralized experience on a decentralized platform. Improvements in IDEX 2.0 include overall performance improvements from UX and UI developments over the past few years, and back-end improvements to how transactions are settled. The Merkle root takes data off-chain, hashes it together into a single data point, which is then submitted on-chain. IDEX is looking at different design proposals including Zero-Knowledge Proofs and the Optimistic rollup. They could not run IDEX on Optimistic rollups because their transactions were too complex to see a substantial increase in their transaction throughput. IDEX’s data is only ever published to an off-chain ledger. They have validators who work to verify that the transactions published off-chain hash up to the same Merkle root that is published on-chain. O2 rollups are scalable to eventually be available to other applications, but IDEX doesn’t see this as a way to monetize but as a way to give back to the community. Alex believes customers care more about application performance and fund security than they do about anonymity. The O2 rollup demo is currently live and can be tested, and they aim to make it fully live during Q1 of 2020. To help support the show, please hit the subscribe

Host Tom Shaughnessy of Delphi Digital is joined by Zaki Manian, the Director of Research at Tendermint Inc and Dean Tribble, the CEO of Agoric. On this episode we dive into into how IBC (inter-blockchain communication) will connect blockchains to enable new use cases.  On this episode we discussed a lot of philosophical questions around a multi-chain vs few chain world, chain sovereignty, Agoric's targeting the world's 20M javascript developers for its smart contract platform, the use cases IBC enables across chains, the status of IBC and so much more. The discussion involves how Cosmos plays into IBC, and how eventually IBC will be a part of Cosmos' SDK. To help support the show, please hit the subscribe button on iTunes so we can keep bringing you episodes like these! Follow Zaki on Twitter Follow Dean on Twitter Follow Tom on Twitter  Resources: Inter-Blockchain Communication Website Delphi Digital's Research Visit Delta Exchange For A $10 Welcome Bonus! Disclosures: This podcast is strictly informational and educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any tokens or securities or to make any financial decisions. Do not trade or invest in any project, tokens, or securities based upon this podcast episode. The host may personally own tokens that are mentioned on the podcast. Tom owns tokens in ETH, BTC, XTZ, STX, SNX, RUNE and sUSD . Lets Talk Bitcoin is a distribution partner for the Chain Reaction Podcast, and our current show features paid sponsorships which may be featured at the start, middle and/or the end of the episode.  - Advertisers: To be a sponsor on this podcast, email Tom@DelphiDigital.io Potential Guests: If you're interested in appearing on the podcast, email Tom@DelphiDigital.io   Music Attribution: Cosmos by From The Dust | https://soundcloud.com/ftdmusic Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_US     

Host Tom Shaughnessy of Delphi Digital is joined by NEAR Protocol's co-founders Alex and Illia to discuss the project. We previously had Alex and Illia on in November of 2018 when the podcast was first starting out so on this episode we discuss what has changed since then, the progress the project has made and much more. Specifically we dive into how NEAR plans to attract developers across three key areas, smart contract wars between layer-1's, governance for NEAR, and what to expect from the protocol's coming Mainnet launch.  NEAR is a sharded, developer-friendly, proof-of-stake public blockchain, built by a world-class team that has built some of the world's only sharded databases at scale. The blockchain is built from the ground up to make it easier to build, onboard and scale To help support the show, please hit the subscribe button on iTunes so we can keep bringing you episodes like these! Follow Alex on Twitter Follow Illia on Twitter Follow Tom on Twitter  Resources: Our First Episode with NEAR from November, 2018 NEAR's Website Ric Burton's Tweet Delphi Digital's Research   Disclosures: This podcast is strictly informational and educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any tokens or securities or to make any financial decisions. Do not trade or invest in any project, tokens, or securities based upon this podcast episode. The host may personally own tokens that are mentioned on the podcast. Tom owns tokens in ETH, BTC, XTZ, STX, SNX, RUNE and KNC. Lets Talk Bitcoin is a distribution partner for the Chain Reaction Podcast, and our current show features paid sponsorships which may be featured at the start, middle and/or the end of the episode. Delphi Digital is a customer of Digital Assets Data.  - Advertisers: To be a sponsor on this podcast, email Tom@DelphiDigital.io Potential Guests: If you're interested in appearing on the podcast, email Tom@DelphiDigital.io   Music Attribution: Cosmos by From The Dust | https://soundcloud.com/ftdmusic Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_US     

Host Tom Shaughnessy of Delphi Digital is joined by Sandeep Nailwal, the co-founder and COO of Matic Network. On this episode we discuss how Matic is using Plasma and proof-of-stake based sidechains to scale Ethereum, how he thinks the landscape of dozens of layer-2 scaling projects will shake out, building on Matic, Bitcoin's lightning network and so much more. Matic Network's token recently crashed on FUD and while this episode was recorded before the news, its a deep dive into the project itself. The audio came out a little low on this episode, apologies on that. To help support the show, please hit the subscribe button on iTunes so we can keep bringing you episodes like these! Follow Sandeep on Twitter  Follow Tom on Twitter  Resources: Check out eToro to Create Your Perfect Crypto Portfolio Matic's Website Delphi Digital's Research Disclosures: This podcast is strictly informational and educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any tokens or securities or to make any financial decisions. Do not trade or invest in any project, tokens, or securities based upon this podcast episode. The host may personally own tokens that are mentioned on the podcast. Tom owns tokens in ETH, BTC, XTZ, STX, SNX and RUNE. Lets Talk Bitcoin is a distribution partner for the Chain Reaction Podcast, and our current show features paid sponsorships which may be featured at the start, middle and/or the end of the episode. Delphi Digital is a customer of Digital Assets Data.  - Advertisers: To be a sponsor on this podcast, email Tom@DelphiDigital.io Potential Guests: If you're interested in appearing on the podcast, email Tom@DelphiDigital.io  - Music Attribution: Cosmos by From The Dust | https://soundcloud.com/ftdmusic Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_US 

Host Tom Shaughnessy of Delphi Digital is joined by Luke Martin, an analyst, trader and host of the Coinist podcast. Luke has gained a massive following for his keen ability to spot trends and opportunities early, especially in crypto. On this episode we dive into his story of leaving graduate school for crypto, the merits of technical analysis, the BTC thesis and so much more. Luke is an incredible guy, and this episode is worth the listen.  To help support the show, please hit the subscribe button on iTunes so we can keep bringing you episodes like these! Follow Luke on Twitter Follow Tom on Twitter  Support The Show Visit Delta Exchange For A $10 Welcome Bonus! Resources: Coinist Podcast Delphi Digital's Research Disclosures: This podcast is strictly informational and educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any tokens or securities or to make any financial decisions. Do not trade or invest in any project, tokens, or securities based upon this podcast episode. The host may personally own tokens that are mentioned on the podcast. Tom owns tokens in ETH, BTC, XTZ, STX, SNX and RUNE. Lets Talk Bitcoin is a distribution partner for the Chain Reaction Podcast, and our current show features paid sponsorships which may be featured at the start, middle and/or the end of the episode. These sponsors and advertisements are not an endorsement by the host or Delphi Digital to use the sponsors products or services which may be risky. Products and services mentioned on advertisements may be risky, and are not suitable for all listeners. Sponsors and advertisements and for strictly informational and educational purposes and are not an endorsement.    Sponsor: To be a sponsor on this research podcast, email Tom@DelphiDigital.io Potential Guests: If you're interested in appearing on the podcast, email Tom@DelphiDigital.io  - Music Attribution: Cosmos by From The Dust | https://soundcloud.com/ftdmusic Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_US 

Host Tom Shaughnessy of Delphi Digital is joined by Amir Haleem, the CEO & Co-Founder of Helium. On this episode we discuss how Helium is creating a crypto incentivized, decentralized telecommunications network.  The network is up to 1,600 nodes, and the company raised $15M from top tier funds.  Amir is the CEO & co-founder of Helium. Prior to Helium, Amir served a long career in the videogame industry as CTO at gaming startup Diversion, and member of the original team behind Battlefield 1942 at DICE in Stockholm, Sweden. Outside of work, Amir is a former world champion esports gamer, co-founder of the popular esports community esreality.com, and builds and races 90's Japanese sports cars. To help support the show, please hit the subscribe button on iTunes so we can keep bringing you episodes like these! Follow Amir on Twitter  Follow Tom on Twitter  Resources: Check out eToro to Create Your Perfect Crypto Portfolio $50 Off A Helium Hotspot Helium Whitepaper Multicoin's Helium Post Delphi Digital's Research Disclosures: This podcast is strictly informational and educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any tokens or securities or to make any financial decisions. Do not trade or invest in any project, tokens, or securities based upon this podcast episode. The host may personally own tokens that are mentioned on the podcast. Tom owns tokens in ETH, BTC, XTZ, STX, SNX and RUNE. Lets Talk Bitcoin is a distribution partner for the Chain Reaction Podcast, and our current show features paid sponsorships which may be featured at the start, middle and/or the end of the episode. Delphi Digital is a customer of Digital Assets Data.  - Advertisers: To be a sponsor on this podcast, email Tom@DelphiDigital.io Potential Guests: If you're interested in appearing on the podcast, email Tom@DelphiDigital.io  - Music Attribution: Cosmos by From The Dust | https://soundcloud.com/ftdmusic Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_US 

Host Tom Shaughnessy of Delphi Digital is joined by Lior Lamesh, Co-Founder & CEO at GK8. Lior is a cyber security expert and on this episode we discuss GK8's crypto security offering that the company believes is the most secure on the market for enterprises, firms and funds.  The Upbit hack of $50M happened after we recorded this episode, although Lior shares some very relevant information on this topic. Lior also dives into the Binance Hack, and how this could have been prevented.  GK8 is a cybersecurity company that offers a high-security custodian technology for managing and safeguarding digital assets. The technology allows financial institutions to execute the entire digital assets management process, including sending transactions to the blockchain, without the need for an Internet connection. GK8's customers manage over $1 billion in digital assets To help support the show, please hit the subscribe button on iTunes so we can keep bringing you episodes like these! Follow Lior on Twitter  GK8's Website Follow Tom on Twitter @Shaughnessy119 Resources: Check out eToro to Create Your Perfect Crypto Portfolio Disclosures: This podcast is strictly informational and educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any tokens or securities or to make any financial decisions. Do not trade or invest in any project, tokens, or securities based upon this podcast episode. The host may personally own tokens that are mentioned on the podcast. Tom owns tokens in ETH, BTC, XTZ, STX, SNX and RUNE. Lets Talk Bitcoin is a distribution partner for the Chain Reaction Podcast, and our current show features paid sponsorships which may be featured at the start, middle and/or the end of the episode. Delphi Digital is a customer of Digital Assets Data.  - Advertisers: To be a sponsor on this podcast, email Tom@DelphiDigital.io Potential Guests: If you're interested in appearing on the podcast, email Tom@DelphiDigital.io  - Music Attribution: Cosmos by From The Dust | https://soundcloud.com/ftdmusic Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_US     

Host Tom Shaughnessy of Delphi Digital is joined by Kyle Kistner, co-founder of bZx Protocol.  For the podcast, we try our best to locate early stage projects in the space. We noticed bZx's total value locked on DeFi pulse grew from $1M in September to near $3.5M in late November. While small in absolute numbers, the increase is notable, and with the launch of Fulcrum and Torque, we believed having the team on the podcast would be worthwhile for our listeners.  BZX is a decentralized protocol that enables lending and borrowing for margin trading. The protocol can be easily integrated into new and existing exchanges or accessed through the bZx portal. On this episode we also discuss the products built on the bZx Protocol including Fulcrum (DeFi margin lending and trading) and Torque (indefinite-term loans with fixed interest rates). To help support the show, please hit the subscribe button on iTunes so we can keep bringing you episodes like these! Follow Kyle on Twitter  BZX's Site BZX's Medium Follow Tom on Twitter @Shaughnessy119 Resources: Check out eToro to Create Your Perfect Crypto Portfolio Disclosures: This podcast is strictly informational and educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any tokens or securities or to make any financial decisions. Do not trade or invest in any project, tokens, or securities based upon this podcast episode. The host may personally own tokens that are mentioned on the podcast. Tom owns tokens in ETH, BTC, STX and SNX. Lets Talk Bitcoin is a distribution partner for the Chain Reaction Podcast, and our current show features paid sponsorships which may be featured at the start, middle and/or the end of the episode. Delphi Digital is a customer of Digital Assets Data.  - Advertisers: To be a sponsor on this podcast, email Tom@DelphiDigital.io Potential Guests: If you're interested in appearing on the podcast, email Tom@DelphiDigital.io  - Music Attribution: Cosmos by From The Dust | https://soundcloud.com/ftdmusic Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_US