Base Layer

Brooke joins us on Base Layer to discuss the Fund of Fund landscape as it relates to venture capital focused funds. Brooke is the Founder & Managing Partner of Hutt Capital, a blockchain venture capital fund of funds based in Portland, OR. Prior to Hutt, Brooke spent ten years across private fund, secondary and direct investing, most recently 4+ years with Greenspring Associates, a venture platform with >$8 billion under management where he spearheaded their blockchain and crypto efforts. Earlier in his career, Brooke held roles with Hamilton Lane and CTC Consulting.

Mike Dudas joins Base Layer to talk about the early days of TheBlock to now becoming one of the "go-to" resources for news and research on crypto. We talk about the narratives that are currently discussed, from geofencing to Libra. We spend a good amount of time also discussing their work on Libra which was exceptional, learn more about their reporters who are breaking stories in the space better than main stream outlets and much more.

Tom Jessop, the head of Fidelity Digital Assets, joins us on Base Layer for a special episode to discuss the over 5 year history of Fidelity's interest and experimentation in crypto and blockchain, leading to their entry into digital assets with their current platform;  in addition we also discuss their potential future roadmap. Fidelity's entry into the space is a pinnacle moment; an institution such as there's, with approximately $7T in assets under administration and their history & brand among Institutional Investors is so incredibly important. Tom came to Fidelity after 16+ years at Goldman Sachs with time spent at Chain prior to making his current move. We discuss their recent study which shows Institutional Investor adoption and gaining interest in the asset class. This is one NOT to miss and one to send to everyone you know.

Tor Bair joins us on Base Layer to discuss Enigma; Enigma is building a privacy layer for the decentralized web. First researched at MIT, Enigma’s network of “secret nodes” can perform computations over encrypted data at scale without ever exposing the raw data itself. By finally enabling decentralized applications to use private and sensitive data, smart contracts built with Enigma become “secret contracts”, allowing developers to create thousands of new, valuable solutions.

Richard Muirhead & Max Mersch from Fabric Ventures join us on Base Layer. Richard is an accomplished founder and investor as well as Max; Fabric Ventures invest in Web 3.0 powering the shift towards human-centric computing. We talk about what that means and the new models of Web 3.0 including the tokenomics, where value accrues/valuation and more. A bunch of FV companies have already been on Base Layer like Casa, Blockstack, Keep and others. This is a great chat with really experienced investors in early stage infrastructure of digital assets.

Michael Zochowski from Logos Network joins Base Layer to discuss how they building a novel transaction network designed for high scalability while maintaining decentralization and trustlessness by using innovations such as DAG's, "an efficient, post-blockchain data architecture built to accommodate the Internet of tomorrow", delegated proof of stake of (DPoS), ensuring optimal throughput while guaranteeing safety and sharding schemes, adding a second dimension of parallelism to transaction validation. Michael has years of experience in traditional finance and is bringing his knowledge of markets and computer science to blockchain.

Pierre Rochard joins Base Layer for an in-depth conversation about the state of Bitcoin. Pierre has researched and written about Bitcoin since February 2013. He co-founded the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute in 2014 to curate the best primary source literature. In addition to developing Bitcoin software, Pierre is an outspoken advocate for Bitcoin's decentralized governance. In 2017 he began co-hosting the Noded Bitcoin Podcast. Pierre is widely recognized as an authority on the investment case for Bitcoin.

Matt Luongo from Keep joins Base Layer for our next episode and it's a great one! As Matt and the folks at Keep say: "Privacy and scalability are the two biggest hurdles to mainstream adoption of public blockchains. We’re tackling privacy by building a bridge between public blockchains and private data. We use keeps, or small off-chain containers, to secure and store this data. Keeps enables entirely new ways to work with private data." We learn about the implications there and how they are using zero knowledge proofs -- we also get one of the best analogies to understand zk proofs. This is a great one! Enjoy.

Tal joins Base Layer today to discuss what Orbs is building in terms of a hybrid blockchain that could get enterprises big and small using public blockchains. We discuss Virtual Chains, Randomized Proof of Stake (RPoS) and much more. Tal has years of experience as an engineer at places like Wix and Kin/Kik, also serving in the Israeli military.

Michael Dunworth, Wyre Co-Founder and CEO joins Base Layer to discuss what their 6 year old company is up to these days. For both individuals and enterprises alike, transferring money internationally serves as one of the most practical use cases for blockchain technology. By accelerating the speed and reducing the cost of international payments, blockchain can help businesses at every scale operate more efficiently and drive substantial spikes in revenue. Wyre uses proprietary blockchain technology to complete cross-border payments, cutting the time and expenses traditionally tied to banks and other financial institutions. While banks take up to 3 days and charge between 4-6% for international money transfers, Wyre completes transactions in less than six hours, charging less than 1%.