Token Talks Interviews With The Best Projects In Crypto

Today, Zach sits down with Robert Leshner, the CEO and founder of Compound, a protocol that creates money markets on the Ethereum blockchain. Compound will allow users and distributed applications to systematically earn interest or borrow assets on-chain in a trustless, transparent, and predictable way. Robert’s insights point to crypto’s increasing importance within the financial system: ##Crypto is Transforming How Finance Works Robert points out three major advantages to cryptographic assets over assets in the legacy financial system. First, asset owners are truly sovereign over what they own. Second, users have the ability to move large quantities of cryptographic assets anywhere in the world instantaneously and for free. And lastly, anyone can program assets without needing permission. ##The Demand to Tokenize Assets Assets from the existing financial system are trickling into crypto as these advantages become more apparent. Robert hypothesizes that over time, there will be a larger quantity of tokeniz

Zach had an awesome talk with Axel Ericsson, a cofounder at 1protocol, focusing on providing proper incentives to both token holders and miners on blockchains. Although a work still in progress, 1protocol’s Vest system aims to allow all players to collaboratively supply work for staking protocols. Here’s what Axel, a new Thiel Fellow, had to say: ##Staking protocols are the future Moving away from opportunity cost to participate in a blockchain to a staking-based incentive system allows for much better alignment of values in a decentralized, trustless system. Axel believes that most systems that can be modelled as market protocols will move to staking protocols as a result. ##It will be tricky to make Consensus protocols currently has a number of problems, such as the “nothing at stake” problem, where forgers in proof-of-stake-based blockchains don’t need to use resources to create new blocks that would be accepted by the majority of participants in the blockchain. Axel notes that a number of participants in

Zach had a refreshing chat with Alan Curtis, the CEO and co-founder of Radar Relay, a peer-to-peer trading platform for Ethereum-based tokens built on the 0x protocol. Radar allows for direct wall-to-wall trading, which means that you never lose custody of your tokens. Here’s what Alan shares with us: ###A decentralized solution to the operational risk of attack The token economy is the intersection of two systems: the token system and the exchange (mediated or peer-to-peer) system. The goal of what they are building at Radar is to connect these two systems. The most immediate problem that they are solving today with Radar Relay is operational risk. ###Introducing the relayer category Radar Relay is a relayer, not an exchange, because user funds are not held. Creating the category of a relayer is a highly disciplined and focused act. You have to frame the problem and create the vocabulary to describe that problem. The flipside of category creation is education. You can’t just introduce a third category, it’s

Zach had a great chat with Joshua Stein, the CEO of Harbor, a company building a decentralized, blockchain-based protocol for issuing and trading securities. With a strong focus on legal compliance (Josh has worked for years as a lawyer), Harbor brings a legitimate solution to the future needs of private equity on the established Ethereum platform. Here’s what Josh had to share with us: ##There’s a market opportunity for compliance-focused tokenized securities While Harbor has a few competitors, Josh stresses how integral legal compliance is to the company’s offer. When lots of money is at stake, it’s important to ensure that all transactions are above board. Harbor aims to bring that quality to decentralized securities trading. ##Decentralization opens up international possibilities Other blockchain-based efforts in this space aggressively tie investors and traders to a platform and jurisdiction. Harbor plans on building compliance across multiple jurisdictions, allowing for greater liquidity and a larger po

Zach had an interesting discussion with Kendrick Nguyen, a co-founder of Republic, a company that enables non-accredited investors to purchase equity in startups. One of their focuses is crowdfunding of cryptocurrency-based and blockchain-based companies. With hopes to become the industry standard for crowdfunding in this space, Republic puts its money where its mouth is, using token tech to power its platform. Kendrick was enthusiastic, with a lot to say: ##Republic hopes to become the Amazon of crypto fundraising Just as Amazon is the “standard” platform for electronic commerce for much of the world, Republic aims to cement a position as the platform of choice for crypto-based startups to raise funds from a variety of investors, whether they are accredited or non-accredited. ##Republic provides rigorous vetting of companies Over 90% of all applications to be listed as a startup seeking funding on Republic are rejected. Republic selects only those companies that it has thoroughly inspected. Campaign pages ha

Zach had a great chat with Nadav Hollander, the founder of Dharma, a generic protocol for tokenized debt agreements. It’s pretty exciting stuff. For a long time, the blockchain community has been talking about the technology’s potential to enable vast suites of new, decentralized financial services. Dharma, which continues to undergo development, will provide a means to allow for tradable debt agreements on top of a blockchain. Now on the Ethereum mainnet in a closed beta, Nadav, a former Google engineer, had a lot to say: ###Dharma aims to be like Ethereum, in a way Ethereum provides a powerful decentralized computing system for individuals around the world to use; a very influential platform. Just as Ethereum is the standard for decentralized computation on blockchain, Dharma hopes to provide the standard for debt agreements on blockchain, with third-party developers coming up with ways to layer new functionality on their platform. ###There are a lot of amazing financial primitives being worked on Although

Robbie Bent from Truebit chats with Zach DeWitt about decentralized computation using off-chain and on-chain solutions with Truebit. Truebit provides a means to tap beyond the Ethereum gas limits for trustless decentralized computation. It does this by enabling computational problems to be solved and verified off-chain, while only looking to the broader Ethereum network to address disputes about the validity of a particular step of a computational result. Rewards are distributed to both solvers and verifiers. The solution gets around the Verifier’s Dilemma (poor economic incentives to verify the validity of a computational result on modern public blockchains) while providing for an efficient route to harness the massive computing network behind Ethereum. Robbie had these insights to offer us: ###Blockchains need to be able to meet massive computational needs Cryptocurrencies are nice, but if blockchain technology is going to revolutionize modern computing, it needs to be able to tackle the same problems that

MacLane Wilkison from NuCypher joined Zach DeWitt to talk about scalable privacy and data control in public blockchains. A Y Combinator alumnus, NuCypher is proxy re-encryption for modern blockchain technology. That is, it allows a central controller to encrypt data held on public blockchain systems, like IPFS, using a public key, with the ability to generate special, private decryption keys to authorize access to others. It’s akin to public-key encryption but much more scalable. MacLane had a lot of great insights about blockchain data security: Blockchains are transparent ledgers that will require data privacy tools. While the most well-known blockchain implementations are cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, there are a variety of uses for blockchains, such as decentralized online file storage. These use cases are attractive to lots of organizations, but they’ll need to ensure that the data can remain private in an otherwise transparent ledger before they can begin to use them. NuCypher is an infrastructure-leve

Richard Ma and Don Ho from Quantstamp joined Zach DeWitt to discuss scalable smart contract security auditing. A recent admit into Y Combinator’s Winter 2018 batch of startups, Quantstamp is building an automated protocol to audit smart contracts along a blockchain. It does this by using blockchain technology itself, in a manner akin to how Ethereum nodes provide for transactional authentication. Here’s what we learned from them about smart contract security: Most blockchains are secure, but smart contracts are not. There have been major hacks in the past, like the 2016 attack on The DAO that stole a third of the Ether from the organization. Quantstamp anticipates more attacks on smart contracts in the future; according to recent research, there are at least 32000 smart contracts with known security vulnerabilities in the wild right now. Ethereum and other smart contract platforms are also growing exponentially. The ability of smart contracts to reduce transaction and enforcement costs for contractual agreeme

Introducing Token Talks, hosted by Zach DeWitt. Join us as we highlight the best emerging projects in crypto through unbiased and exclusive interviews with blockchain technology founders. Token Talks intends to make the cryptocurrency ecosystem more accessible by connecting thought leaders and entrepreneurs with mainstream companies, consumers, and investors. This podcast is produced by Wing Venture Capital (aka “Wing”), a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm. Multiple episodes are released every month and discussions include ICOs, altcoins, decentralization, token economics and the future of digital currency in tech. Visit www.wing.vc for more details.