The Ledger Podcast

How was ArtBlocks founded? Who are the first generative artists who started out there? What did the Auto Glyphs project change for them?During NFT Paris, in a room full of some of the best generative artists in the world, we recorded this one hour conversation between Ledger VP of Comms Ariel Wengroff and prominent figures in the ArtBlocks community (with Erick Calderon a.k.a. Snowfro, Sofia Garcia from ArtXCode, Glenn a.k.a. BlockBird, Matt a.k.a. Balon_art and Jeremy a.k.a. DeFiStaker), to discuss everything about generative art, from the moment where usual collectors could no longer afford to buy their own art to their “late night scrolling for new art” routine.Is it okay to come as a flipper if you stay as a collector? How do creators approach pricing? Why is it important to see your digital art in real life and not just on a thumbnail on OpenSea? And yes, you know us, what’s their biggest security fail? This new episode answers all of these questions, and many more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

2022 was a big moment for Ethereum, the long awaited MERGE event ended up finally taking place on September 15th, shifting Ethereum from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake consensus and significantly reducing its energy consumption along the way, a massive step towards Ethereum 2.0.  But there’s still somewhat of a long road of Ethereum updates ahead, including the Surge, the Verge, the Purge and the Splurge, sounds like a 90s rap song but it isn’t, this what it’s going to take for Ethereum to scale and be mass adoption ready. On this new episode of On The Ledger, your host Mo El-Sayed discusses how to scale Ethereum without compromising on decentralization or security, with the Founder of the Aave-Chan initiative Marc Zeller and our Chief Technology Office Charles Guillemet. With a couple of bold statements on Arbitrum and Optimism, sharding and more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How can attention drive value? How to connect the attention economy to the web3 economy?In a world of abundance, our time and focus is probably one of the last items you cannot… scale. Of course, we can publish work, be easy to find, and generate thousands of impressions in seconds. But when do people actually care? When do you care?NFTs have driven a LOT of attention. Whether you might think it’s for good or bad reasons- they just have. Either it’s because they are scarce, or because they have a purpose, because you value their creators. Or all of the above. And this is why they have value, even if someone thinks they’re just another overpriced jpegs.In a symbiotic conversation with Derek Edwards (partner at Collab + Currency and author of a great medium piece on why and how NFTs store value), Ian Rogers deep dives into on the past, present, and future of NFTs and why, pretty soon, everything that can be digital will be digital. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The more value you have, the more malicious actors will try to get it. You already know that if you own more than a couple of small bags of crypto. But imagine you’re a company or an organization trying to manage their digital assets at scale.This question arose a couple of years ago. Family offices, hedge funds, custodians, exchanges… They had no idea how to secure their assets (or they would do it from a Ledger Nano S). And even less how to manage them at scale. They needed enterprise-grade security with the right governance layer to operate.A product had to be built. Ledger had to come up with a solution. This is Ledger Enterprise, the industry’s best kept secret - for now.In this very special episode of On The Ledger, Ian Rogers gets our Chief Technology Officer Charles and our VP for Business Solutions, Alex Zinder to explain how we intended that solution, everything one can do with it, and why we think that… it’s simply the best out there. Not just the more secure. The best. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The crypto phenomenon is just one symptom among many: we are shifting from a mass market to an era of niches.But then, what is a niche exactly? Where does a community start?In this age of modern loneliness, is swiping the new sign of being part of a community?What do regressive conspiracy movements tell us about a new sense of belonging?With the hyper financialization of our everyday lives, should we demonize new technologies and speculation?In a fascinating discussion with our Chief Experience Officer Ian Rogers, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou brings his answers to these questions, and raises a lot of other ones…Learn more on his book Speculative Communities here: www.ariskomporozos.org Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This year has seen the emergence of a variety of AI products showing us a glimpse of the exponential age. But one other innovation has the potential to completely change our world - Quantum computing. Quantum computers are very different from the classical computers that have been around for more than half a century. They harness the power of quantum mechanics to sift through huge numbers of possibilities and extract solutions to problems that might have otherwise been impossible to solve.But then, if quantum computing can break crypto-encryption, what will happen to blockchain technology? Is there a chance that we’ll see quantum computers break current cryptography in our lifetime? If not, what will we see in our lifetime?To answer those questions, we are happy to talk to our CTO Charles Guillemet and Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Chief Security Officer at Taurus, with a quick appearance from Chat GPT, for a deep, slightly technical, but always insightful conversation, 100% free of sci-fi speculation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

OBJKT is a marketplace that truly feels like a community – with 20,000 monthly active users and 6 millions tokens available, artists are also collectors, and, quite often, the other way around.It's a place that is 100% organic, that feels like the indie-rock scene in the overall NFT ecosystem.How can we build it so it becomes “bigger than we could ever imagine”? How can we make it well-known without giving even two cents to marketing? How can we ensure it remains accessible for everyone?As OBJKT is now integrated on the Discover section of our Ledger Live app, we are very pleased to meet with its three founders Viktor Felder, Brian and Timothy McAlister for an insightful conversation with Ledger's Chief Experience Officer Ian Rogers on its creation, how many lives it has changed since then, and what's coming up for OBJKT in 2023. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On the Ledger today, we are glad to receive a man who has changed the content creation industry. Yancey Strickler is one of the crowdfunding pioneers who co-founded Kickstarter 17 years ago, who now turned into a NFT degen in the last months and founded Metalabel, a release club where groups of people who share the same interests collaborate to drop and support work together.In an one-on-one discussion with our Chief Experience Officer, he discusses inventing the coolest magazine of tomorrow, how on-chain art is and will be changing the music industry and the life of creators (even if a large majority of them still do not want to have anything to do with crypto), how floor price does not reflect the order of magnitude of a piece of art, the importance of carefully choosing who you’re squadding with, and how to resist mediocrity when building your new project. Oh, and also: what if it’s not about rarity, but about love? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When you are a creator, how do you shake up the cobwebs and keep taking creative risks?This is the question our guest for this episode asked himself after becoming a successful angel investor in tech, publishing a long list of best-sellers (check his 4-Hour series) and a podcaster came to ask himself recently. His answer was: deep diving into web3, and creating “an emergent long fiction project” in the form of an NFT project: CockPunch. And you should be aware that this one is not for flippers.Listen to this one and one conversation between Tim Ferriss and our Chief Experience Officer Ian Rogers and find out while there is no failed experiment, what’s really new about web3, how to keep getting of your comfort zone, how the CockPunch project helped funding the research on psychedelic medicine and (totally unrelated) where Ian used to keep his weed in high school. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Curious about our new device, Ledger Stax?Want to know how we first thought of this new generation of hardware wallets, and what it took to bring it to life?Then listen to this discussion between our Chief Experience Officer Ian Rogers and Tony Fadell. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.