Raoul Pal: The Journey Man

Real Vision senior editor Ash Bennington is joined by Evan Kuo, founder of Ampleforth, to discuss how Ampleforth was engineered specifically to satisfy characteristics of the ideal reserve currency. By working with Stanford's Hoover Institute for several years, Kuo and his team have been refining what it means to be a "good" reserve currency. A key innovation lies in their maneuver to substitute price volatility with supply volatility. Kuo's goal is to create the ultimate unit of account, resistant to demand shocks typically seen in business cycle contractions. Filmed on June 17, 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Real Vision senior editor Ash Bennington welcomes Eric Demuth, CEO of BitPanda to discuss the creation of BitPanda and the BEST token, Bitcoin's role as a digital asset, and interoperability within blockchain ecosystems. Since there is an absence of a stock investing culture in Europe, Demuth explains the need for an educational component of BitPanda that will help it become the investment platform for investors looking to participate in the market. He dives into the creation of the BEST token that allows users to benefit from the BitPanda platform. Demuth argues that a decentralized system that combines all of the capabilities from existing blockchains will make projects easier to build and thereby moving closer towards his goal of tokenizing the world. Filmed on June 7, 2021. Key Learnings: Demuth argues that new investors should only invest in things that are simple, easy to understand, and are constructed with their interests in mind. He stresses that the best investments are made by the individual after proper diligence and preparation are conducted. This ensures that the investment satisfies the investor’s risk appetite and long-term strategic goals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ash Bennington, senior crypto editor for Real Vision, welcomes Mance Harmon, CEO of Hedera Hashgraph, to discuss consensus algorithms and the creation of Hedera Hashgraph. Starting in 2012, Harmon and his team were working to solve a distributed consensus math problem, specifically how to create a consensus algorithm that maximized both performance and security simultaneously. He states that this has been a decades old problem, and while it is clear already how to have the best security via asynchronous byzantine fault tolerance, it has always come at the expense of resource requirements—bandwidth or scaling issues. This was solved in 2015 with the creation of Hashgraph, and with its algorithm, it has led to a public distributed ledger with scalable and maximized performance and security properties. Filmed May 18th, 2021. Key Learnings: It's possible to create a consensus algorithm that makes it possible for the participants within a network to vote on transactions—however, as the number of transactions increases, the voting and, by extension, bandwidth required go up exponentially. What Hashgraph has innovated on is that by submitting just 2 hashes of information, that being the last transactions sent and received, the network can chain them into a graph and conceptually represent who knew what and when. When paired with a consensus algorithm, anyone who receives that data can calculate what the consensus would be without having to vote or ask the question, thus cutting out the middleman or bandwidth requirement and resulting in the creation of virtual voting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Eric Kryski, CEO and co-founder of Bidali, sits down with Ethan Buchman, CEO of Informal Systems and co-founder of Cosmos, to discuss the Cosmos network and interoperable blockchains as well as a vision for localized economies and municipal sovereignty. Kryski and Buchman explore the challenges of building blockchain application layers on Bitcoin's and Ethereum's networks as well as achieving interoperability between protocols—even within the same network. Buchman shares how Cosmos' ecosystem is able to accomplish interoperability that restores sovereignty with an application-specific chain while providing a mature development environment. The work being done at Cosmos flows in Buchman's vision for more localized, interoperable economies, and he expands on this by breaking down his thoughts on community currencies, municipal sovereignty, and mutual credit systems. Filmed on May 18, 2021. Key Learnings: Buchman explains how Cosmos is aiming to become "the internet of blockchains" by allowing developers to build their blockchains in such a way that it will enable communication with each other in a decentralized way. He acknowledges how this sort of functionality within the crypto ecosystem would support economies that would become more localized and municipalities that become sovereign as diverse needs and values call for varied means of governance. Buchman argues that a shift toward localism and away from our dependence on globalization will lead to more sustainable, self-sufficient, and anti-fragile economies and societies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Santiago Velez, entrepreneur and digital assets investor for Block Digital Corporation & AD, Inc., sits down with Chris Spadafora, founder of BadgerDAO, to discuss his background, the journey to found BadgerDAO, wrapped digital assets, risk, governance, and his thoughts on the crypto ecosystem. Following several years of investing in the space, Spadafora came to the conclusion that there was a lack of Bitcoin that can be wrapped or ported off of the bitcoin network and used as a utility on other blockchains. Spadafora asked, "How do you build an open community and project that wants to enable Bitcoin to work in a trusted and non-custodial way in addition to having an organization or business that is managed by the people vs a traditional corporate structure?" He recognized that the smart contract capabilities of Ethereum met a lot of the needs he was looking for in trying to utilize the liquidity of Bitcoin. While there are other protocols building on top of the Bitcoin network, Spadafora believes that the robustness of the smart contract technology that Ethereum built, in addition to the lack of liquidity and lack of interoperability in relation to the tools for daily usage, were key to fulfilling that vision. Filmed on May 6, 2021. Key learnings: To date, 1% of Bitcoin has been wrapped to port over to other blockchains. Spadafora believes that, moving forward, there will be anywhere between 20-40% of all Bitcoin will be wrapped and living on other chains because it is the ultimate collateral. While seeing the appreciation of Bitcoin in one’s wallet is good, being able to use it, put it to work, and have access to different financial services and applications that are traditionally reserved to hedge funds brings the power back to the people. Spadafora identifies that DeFi users have access to many great opportunities to gain interest; however, it requires too many steps, knowledge, and fees. Meanwhile, BadgerDAO allows for users to earn anywhere between 5%-30% interest on their Bitcoin while still retaining custody of their digital assets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Gary Vaynerchuk, chairman of VaynerX and CEO of VaynerMedia, sits down with Raoul Pal, co-founder and CEO of Real Vision, for a wide-ranging discussion on Vaynerchuck’s journey into crypto and the founding of VaynerX and VaynerMedia as well as Vaynerchuck’s thoughts on the current and future state of the blockchain ecosystem. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thomas Walton-Pocock, co-founder and former CEO of Aztez, sits down with Arthur Breitman, co-founder of Tezos, to discuss Tezos’ on-chain governance approach, smart contract platform, and scalability potential as well as his thoughts on the direction of decentralized finance (DeFi). Breitman breaks down the weaknesses of the forking model as a form of governance and argues that on-chain governance is the way to achieve innovation on protocols without centralization. Tezos implements this through a self-amending crypto ledger, and Breitman shares how the protocol accomplishes this through its scripting language, Michelson, for its smart contract platform, highlighting some of its benefits such as formal verification. He also shares his thoughts on scalability via a “portfolio of scaling” approach, the principles of a well-designed stablecoin, and decentralized exchanges (DEXs). Key Learnings: Breitman points out that when forks occur on a blockchain, it’s not free choice by all stakeholders on the network—on the other hand, Tezos seeks open participation when amending the protocol so that all stakeholders can help secure its network. Tezos also distinguishes itself through its use of formal verification via Michelson. Historically, formal verification has been applied in the aerospace and nuclear energy sectors, where the costs of mistakes are drastic, and Breitman states that its use in Tezos’ protocol allows for developers to rule out and avoid whole classes of bugs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Beniamin Mincu, founder and CEO of Elrond, joins Santiago Velez, co-founder and R&D division lead for Block Digital, to discuss the Elrond Network and how it’s built as well as scalability, interoperability, and future applications. When he founded Elrond, Mincu’s goals were to move away from what he calls the “dial up” version of the blockchain space and simplify the UX in order to lower the barrier to entry. To that end, Elrond aimed to build a system that could bring a 1000x improvement in throughput, execution speed, and transaction cost . This is implemented through adaptive state sharding and a secure proof of stake. Filmed April 26th, 2021. Key Learnings: Elrond tries to solve the central problem of layer 1 blockchains where there is traditionally a trade-off between security, decentralization, and scalability by looking to build a transparent financial system that can extend access to anyone anywhere. Mincu believes this is fundamentally important as the current state of the economy is low-bandwidth and high latency—any user would still have to wait for overnight transfers. Mincu views this inefficiency as a broken piece of the traditional system that cannot be simply fixed from inside. A better solution, he feels, is instead opting to create a system that can act as a complimentary asset. According to Mincu, there are still 1.7 billion people that are not connected to the current financial system and don’t have any kind of basic financial infrastructure. Giving these people a chance to participate would increase the entire effectiveness of the system significantly for the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices