Base Layer

Nodar joins me on Base Layer to talk about his exciting project, Zapper which aims to increase the GDP of DeFi by abstracting the complexities of accessing unique opportunities faced by retail investors, fund managers and builders around the world. We had a detailed conversation about how current DeFi works, yield farming and all the nuisances involved to participate. Zapper is a project a lot of people are talking about because it connect a lot of the disparate pieces in DeFi in one location. Great episode and you'll learn a lot.–––EQUOSDiginex is the first company with a cryptocurrency exchange to be listed in the US. That exchange, EQUOS, has been built to institutional standards, but is available to everyone. You can trade Bitcoin and Ethereum spot, as well as Bitcoin perpetuals, and get a 5% discount on all fees, by signing up using equos.com/baselayer

Sam joins me on Base Layer and it's a really interesting chat! From his days at Everipedia all the way to Frax we discuss a full body of work in Digital Assets. Frax is the first stablecoin with an end goal of fully algorithmic mechanism that seeks to achieve this goal by beginning fully collateralized and slowly removing the collateral through on-chain smart contracts as long as the price remains stable at $1. According to Sam and the the team the Frax Protocol is the first ever stablecoin to change collateralization ratios dynamically to achieve an algorithmic stablecoin. Must listen!–––EQUOSDiginex is the first company with a cryptocurrency exchange to be listed in the US. That exchange, EQUOS, has been built to institutional standards, but is available to everyone. You can trade Bitcoin and Ethereum spot, as well as Bitcoin perpetuals, and get a 5% discount on all fees, by signing up using equos.com/baselayer

Richard joins us on Base Layer for a great show! During the later part of a 17 year career at Nomura, Richard began to see the potentiality of Digital Assets and pursued multiple venues to participate, including being an investor in Diginex. He saw the institutional grade infrastructure they were building and their focus on Compliance, Trust and having the best security available for custody that even garnered the highest rating that the Ministry of Defense provides to security companies. We spent time discussing –––EQUOSDiginex is the first company with a cryptocurrency exchange to be listed in the US. That exchange, EQUOS, has been built to institutional standards, but is available to everyone. You can trade Bitcoin and Ethereum spot, as well as Bitcoin perpetuals, and get a 5% discount on all fees, by signing up using equos.com/baselayer

Camila joins me on the show for one of the most truthful and sometimes raw takes on what's happening in DeFi. We talk about everything from yield farming and some of the blow up's that have happened to metrics we should be using to evaluate success. We discuss some possible ways that the DeFi community could self govern and what happens if that doesn't happen. This was one of my favorite conversations - unscripted, raw and getting to the nitty gritty on DeFi.

Jed and Denelle join us for a full review of Stellar; an open-source payments network that serves as a distributed intermediary blockchain for global financial systems and circulates a native asset, Stellar Lumens (XLM). Before co-founding Stellar, Jed also co-found Ripple -- he has been an integral part of Digital Assets for nearly a decade. Before joining Stellar's Foundation, Denelle spent 8 years at Mozilla and has years of experience in the legal and regulatory landscape. We had a detailed conversation about Stellar and Lumens role in an evolving Digital Asset ecosystem, including how the asset was built to assist in the creation of synthetics and compostable digital assets.

Garry Tan is a legend...end of story. Listen why here.No seriously, Garry is a designer, engineer, and investor in early stage startups. Cofounder and managing partner of Initialized Capital, an early stage venture capital fund that was earliest in Coinbase and Instacart. They are a team of 6 investing partners with over $770M in assets under management and our startups have created more than $40 billion in market value in the past 8 years. They focus on pre-product-market-fit seed and seek to be the investor of record at that stage. We spoke about everything from investing in a covid world to Digital Assets, DAO's and much more.

Nate joins us for a great conversation on the work he took part in to analyze the stablecoin market (report found here). In this podcast we discuss the rise of stablecoins, their purpose in digital assets, the velocity and growth of them in 2020 as a function of global economic issues and the rise of DeFi and much more. If you're learning about stablecoins or just want to make sure you're up to date on great analysis check this one out!

Hart joins me on Base Layer to discuss his journey from Goldman to start his company, UMA which is designed to power the financial innovations made possible by permissionless, public blockchains, like Ethereum. Using concepts borrowed from fiat financial derivatives, UMA defines an open-source protocol that allows any two counterparties to design and create their own financial contracts. But unlike traditional derivatives, UMA contracts are secured with economic incentives alone, making them self-enforcing and universally accessible. We learn how this is done, what you can do with it and much more.

Anton joins me for a great episode of Base Layer as we learn all about 1inch after news of the $2.8M investment round closure with some significant investors in Digital Assets. For those unfamiliar, DEX's are Decentralized Exchanges vs what we call CEX's (Centralized: Coinbase, Kraken, etc). 1inch has recently surpassed the landmark figure of one billion USD! Real-time stats are available here: http://duneanalytics.com/1inch. We talk about how the team met and colloborated at hackathon's and put together the code for 1inch in ~48 hours (unreal!) 1inch is now a leading decentralized exchange aggregator that sources liquidity from various exchanges. Using smart contract technology to split a single trade transaction across multiple DEXs, they enable users to optimize and customize trades.

Tom Trowbridge is former President of Hedera Hashgraph, a public distributed ledger based on the Hashgraph consensus algorithm. Mr. Trowbridge has been advising and investing in technology companies since 1996. He started his career in 1996 as an investment banker in the telecom group at Bear Stearns & Co., and subsequently spent three and a half years at the telecom and media private equity firm Alta Communications, where he executed ten deals in technology, telecom, and media and served on two boards. Prior to Hedera, he started and ran the New York office for UK-based Odey Asset Management. Before Odey, he held various positions at Lombard Odier, Atticus Capital, and Goldman Sachs.