Token Talks Interviews With The Best Projects In Crypto

StarkWare is solving two of blockchain’s biggest issues, scalability and privacy, using STARK technology and zero-knowledge proofs. Listen to learn how StarkWare and their new product StarkExchange work, the future use-cases of this technology, and how StarkWare plans to move the source of truth from big trusted parties back to the end-users. ##Addressing the two problems of blockchains StarkWare wants to solve scalability and privacy on blockchains with no trusted set ups and no hidden factors in a transparent and blockchain-compatible way. The goal is to do this as a technology provider, without minting another token and trying to become another internet money, but by providing the technology as a layer two initially to the ecosystem and potentially later on at layer one. StarkWare has developed a full proof-stack using STARK technology to generate and verify proofs of computational integrity. A STARK is a proof, a mechanism that makes you confident that a statement is correct. A simple analogy would be to

What if launching an application on the blockchain was fast, simple, and user-friendly? Today, we are joined by Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol, a community operated cloud platform which aims to enable developers to write, test, and deploy scalable, decentralized applications in minutes. Listen to learn about how the protocol works, the potential use-cases and what they’re currently experimenting with, and the exciting things we can expect to see from NEAR in the future. ##What is NEAR? NEAR Protocol is a community operated, developer-friendly cloud built on a proof-of-stake public blockchain. Their vision to move from centralized clouds and applications to a world in which developers can build applications that communicate with each other and where users control their data. For example, if a developer builds a social app and launches it on this platform, anyone else can build new user interfaces and use the users’ data from this app for other apps with the users’ permission. ##Why NEAR? The blo

What if there was a way retain total privacy with your digital transactions? Today’s guest is Daniel Lehnberg, a core developer for Grin, an exciting new cryptocurrency that launched earlier this year. Join us for a look at how Grin aims to be the first private electronic cash, how it compares to Bitcoin, and the important impact this technology could have on democracy. ##Cash-Like Cryptocurrency Grin is a new cryptocurrency with the goal of becoming a global, digital cash. This means there is no transaction history, and you can retain total privacy with no permanent record of your sent and received payments. Grin’s conception story is similar to Bitcoin in that it has pseudonymous founders and developers, there is no company behind it, there was no pre-mine, and there is a vibrant community of early adopters and developers supporting the ecosystem. The protocol and the implementation itself takes pride in being very simple and minimalistic by design. It’s a fresh take on how to do private and electronic cash

What is blockchain simulation? When launching a public blockchain, it’s essential to think through and understand the incentives, behavioral economics, and crypto economics prior to going live, and the most accurate way of doing that is through simulation. On this special episode, we’re joined by both Gauntlet and Computable Labs to discuss what both companies are doing in the space and how they’re working together. ##Gauntlet - Blockchain Testing, Analysis, and Simulation Decentralized governance is difficult. Once something is live on the mainnet, large scale changes become difficult if not impossible to make, so developers need to think through the incentives, behavioral economics, and crypto economics before the actual launch. Gauntlet is a platform for blockchain testing, analysis, and simulation. They want to help teams iterate faster in the crypto space and for consumers and users of these platforms to have increased confidence in these protocols. “Statistical modeling can help you understand where yo

UMA stands for universal market access, and UMA’s co-founder Hart Lambur, along with the rest of the team, wanted a name that reflected their bigger vision and what they’re trying to do, which is create universal market access for financial products. ##A decentralized financial contracts platform UMA is a decentralized financial contracts platform that believes financial markets should be universally accessible. UMA is designed to power the financial innovations made possible by permissionless, public blockchains like Ethereum. They just launched their first product, USStocks, an S&P 500 tracking token, which is being traded and listed on a decentralized exchange, DDEX. This product is not accessible to people in the US, nor is it marketable to them. It’s for users without access to the US equity markets, but who want exposure to the broader S&P. It’s designed as an ERC20 token that will, behind the scenes, track the S&P 500 performance. You buy it on an exchange, you own it, and you get that perf

Executing large orders of digital assets is really difficult. Tagomi makes it simple by combining institutional grade services with superior execution technology for digital assets and cryptocurrencies. Join us as we chat with Marc and Kevin from Tagomi to learn how their products provide operational ease and reduce trading costs for institutional investors. ##Electronic agency brokerage in the digital asset space Tagomi connects to multiple liquidity sources and allows clients to place larger and more sophisticated trades using multiple liquidity sources. They also automate the settlement and clearing piece working with partner banks and allowing clients to deposit and custody with them as well, using integrated third parties. Tagomi is never on the other side of the bet, and they have the ability to do everything in the client’s interest and be fully aligned. Part of their transparency is generating post-trade reports, showing clients how trades are executed. ##Tagomi and the crypto landscape Tagomi is a bi

What if you could earn interest on your Ethereum holdings using a decentralized network that removes any barriers to entry? Rocket Pool wants to allow users to do just that. There’s no need to worry about maintaining an extensive staking infrastructure. Just plug and play. Our guest today is CTO and co-founder of Rocket Pool, David Rugendyke. Join us to learn about Rocket Pool’s features and services, when you can expect to starting using the network, and what David thinks about proof of stake versus proof of work. ##Ethereum transitioning to PoS Many people are familiar with the way current mining pools work. With Bitcoin you can put a computer to work to validate transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain, and in return for that you are awarded in Bitcoin. Ethereum is transitioning to a new way of doing this called proof of stake (PoS), which will allow users to earn interest on their Ethereum holdings by essentially keeping a computer online to validate transactions. ##A decentralized, easy-to-use staking serv

Whether a token issuer wants to launch a private sale with 10 investors or a public sale with 10,000 investors, the goal of CoinList is to help that issuer succeed by managing capital formation and building community. A trusted platform CoinList is a trusted platform for running compliant token sales. CoinList’s infrastructure has supported over $400 million in investments for over 30 token sale projects since August 2017. Some of the projects that have run token sales on CoinList include Filecoin, Origin, Props, and Blockstack. President and co-founder Andy Bromberg has been in the space for a long time. He was excited about Bitcoin early on at Stanford, where he founded the Stanford Bitcoin Club in 2013, and he has insightful perspectives on the crypto ecosystem. Managing token sales and handling compliance “In the token space there is a lot of innovation happening at the legal structure level,” says Andy, “and you’ve got to get comfortable with how that’s happening, or trust someone that is an expert in th

How do decentralized applications get data from underlying sources and transform it in meaningful ways? Yaniv Tal is the Project Lead at The Graph, a new decentralized query and indexing protocol for Web3 making data easily available to developers using GraphQL. ##Getting data from blockchains is difficult Anyone building smart contracts on a blockchain like Ethereum will need to access specific data with queries, and to do those kinds of queries, indexes are needed, which will be application specific. The founders of The Graph realized early on when building on Ethereum that this indexing later was a missing part of the stack, and people were creating their own proprietary indexing servers. They felt that this really broke many of the benefits that you would want out of building with Web3, and so they built The Graph. ##The Graph and GraphQL The Graph is a query and indexing protocol for Web3 that indexes data from blockchains and storage networks to make it easily available to developers over GraphQL, a que

What is a crypto index fund? Tune in as our guest, Hunter Horsley, CEO and cofounder of Bitwise, discusses how crypto index funds work, the firm’s Bitcoin ETF application, and how it could potentially impact the space if it gets approved. ##Bitwise is the first cryptocurrency fund Bitwise is the leading provider of index funds in the crypto space. They launched the first cryptocurrency index fund in 2017, and they have both index products as well as beta products. Based in San Francisco, the Bitwise team combines modern software expertise with deep asset management experience, coming from firms including Facebook, Wealthfront, and BlackRock. They produce a top ten exposure that rebalances monthly that doesn’t have a strong opinion about how the future will play out, but allows you to participate in whatever that ends up being. ##Bitwise facilitates institutional buyers There are amazing tools that are oriented toward self-directed individual investors, which, in the US, represents about $3 trillion in assets.

Castle Island Ventures is an early-stage venture fund with a focus on equity investments at the pre-seed or seed level into companies that are building in and around permissionless blockchains. Listen to hear from some of the smartest investors in the space--co-founders and managing partners of Castle Island, Nic Carter and Matt Walsh--as they discuss current trends, predictions, and what they’re looking out for. Pick and shovel oriented businesses Castle Island has the view that permissionless blockchains are a new paradigm with infrastructure still needed for support. Infrastructure to them means things like key management, custody services, exchange technology, data companies--what they call “pick and shovel oriented businesses.” “I think most people can agree that there’s a level of this plumbing that just needs to exist in order for any of these things to be successful,” says Walsh, “for an institution to get comfortable holding these assets and giving their customers access to them.” Altering the topolo

The internet has fundamentally changed our lives, but along with the many benefits, what kinds of challenges has it created? For Dawn Song, founder and CEO of Oasis Labs, the issues of security and privacy are a top priority. She and her team of world renowned, top security researchers and professors from Berkeley and MIT are developing new technologies to address many of these challenges. Listen to learn how Oasis could radically change how our personal data is secured and shared, eliminate data silos, and enable developers to build privacy-preserving applications without specialized knowledge or expertise in privacy and security. The Importance of Privacy Security and privacy are a big concern for most of us. We continue to see large-scale security breaches in which companies are losing data for hundreds of millions of users at a time, and almost everyone has been affected. To solve this problem, Oasis is building a privacy-first smart contract platform. Oasis will combine secure software and hardware to en

What does it mean to bundle your tokenized assets? And what are the potential benefits? Felix Feng is the founder and CEO of Set Protocol, a platform to create, manage, and purchase baskets of tokenized assets. Rather than buying five different tokens and paying a gas fee to purchase those tokens individually, with Set, you can bundle all five of those tokens and buy them in a single order. Decentralized Finance Felix is most excited about crypto’s potential to transform the financial services industry, and the possibility of the current financial rails being rebuilt in a decentralized manner. The cost to build your own financial services company has decreased from millions of dollars to being free to anyone who can code. This is because these primitives and protocols are permissionless and free to use. People can start building using these tools today. As the world becomes increasingly more digital, creating a new financial tooling set to interact with those assets will be really powerful, and this process c

We’ve all heard of the blockchain, but what is blockmesh? Spacemesh is building a novel, layer-one protocol with the aim of developing a blockmesh operating system accessible to anyone. Listen as Spacemesh CEO and cofounder Tomer Afek explains how the Proof of Space Time (PoST) consensus protocol is built around the notion of fairness, and what that means in the creation of a decentralized, programmable cryptocurrency. ##Proof of Work, Proof of Stake, Proof of Space Time Rather than using Proof of Work (PoW) like Bitcoin, which has scalability and energy wastefulness issues, or Proof of Stake (PoStake) like Ethereum, which comes at the cost of compromised decentralization and security, Spacemesh is using a different type of consensus called Proof of Space Time (PoST). Proof of Space Time is being designed to allow participants to store data on their computer over a period of time. This essentially means that the kind of proof users will provide is that they have contributed to the security of the network by s

Mike Cagney, co-founder and CEO of Figure, is applying blockchain technology to traditional financial services in compelling new ways. Listen to learn how Figure and its new native blockchain Provenance are changing the way consumers access home equity products, and what exciting things are in store for the future of the financial services industry. ##Faster and Cheaper Home Equity Products with Figure Figure is an equity release business, offering an alternative to a traditional HELOC (home equity line of credit). With Figure, you can have a home equity line of credit in less than five minutes and be funded in less than five days, which is much faster than the four months it takes that process in the traditional market today. Figure is launching two products, one being a home equity line of credit and the other an alternative to a reverse mortgage called a buy-rent-back, and both products are being originated native on blockchain. ##Provenance, a New Native Blockchain What’s unique about Figure is that it op

What are the advantages of using a hardware wallet to secure your crypto assets? Thomas France, co-founder of Ledger, wants to make it easy for average users--as well as power users--to safely generate and manage their keys offline in a secure environment. Listen as Thomas explains the simple steps to using Ledger and why it’s the most popular hardware wallet in the world, with over one million devices sold across 65 countries. ##Why choose a hardware wallet? With hot wallets and cold wallets the pros and cons are really about the spectrum between usability and security. A hot wallet is anything in which your keys are exposed to the network, and a cold wallet is one in which the keys are never exposed to the network. Hot wallets are usually much more accessible and easy to use than cold wallets, which are of course typically much more secure. The hardware wallet is an external device that is solely dedicated to managing your keys that you can integrate with different types of software wallets, which makes it

Antonio Juliano, founder and CEO of dYdX, wants to add another layer to the decentralized financial stack, and dYdX is doing this by building a protocol that lets you go short or get leverage on any cryptocurrency. Listen to learn how dYdX makes decentralized financial derivatives and margin trading possible, and what the future may hold for the crypto counterpart of the most massive market in the world. ##The Decentralized Financial Stack Derivatives are far and away the largest market in the world, usually at about 10x the spot market. With cryptocurrency, the spot market is somewhere in the billions. You would expect the derivatives market to be somewhere in the tens of billions, but it’s not, which makes it a potentially massive and unrealized market. And that’s something Antonio and the dYdX team are really excited to tackle. ##A Margin Trading Protocol dYdX is a protocol for decentralized financial derivatives and margin trading. The first thing they’re building is a margin trading protocol that lets yo

Avichal Garg, co-founder and managing partner at Electric Capital, says programmable money is currently the most valuable segment of the cryptocurrency market. Listen to find out how the team at Electric have developed their crypto investment strategy, and why programmable money is at the foundation of this strategy. ##Who is Electric Capital? Electric Capital is a digital asset management firm, founded by Avichal Garg, prominent angel Elad Gil, and Curtis Spencer, that invests in both liquid and illiquid tokens that are emerging stores of value and rooted in novel technology. Electric takes positions in tokens and ecosystems that have real technologies, real teams, and real go-to-markets that have the potential to create value in the next decade. ##Programmable money Electric’s thesis centers around investment in programmable money, specifically stores of value such as Bitcoin, privacy coins like Monero and Zcash, and smart contracts for financial platforms, including Ethereum. Programmable money has a lot t

If cryptocurrencies were more stable, would more people use them? Nader Al-Naji, CEO and Co-Founder of Basis, believes price volatility is the biggest barrier to more widespread use, and his answer to this is Basis: a new cryptocurrency with an algorithmic central bank designed to keep the price of Basis stable and usable around the world. Listen as Nader explains how Basis is different--and more scalable--than other stablecoins. ##A Basket of Goods Many stablecoins are said to be “pegged” to the US dollar, and Basis plans to start out with this as a guide also. However, the long term goal with Basis is to create a cryptocurrency that maintains a stable purchasing power against a ‘Basket of Goods,’ or the everyday purchases of the average person. If people are confident in the purchasing power of a currency over time, they are more likely to accept and use the currency for things such as structuring a loan or paying wages. ##Why use Basis? People with access to stable, conventional currencies might be perfect

What if you could verify the entire blockchain from your smartphone? Izaak Meckler and Evan Shapiro are cofounders of Coda, a new cryptocurrency protocol that reduces the size of the blockchain from gigabytes down to the size of a few tweets. Izaak and Evan explain how cryptocurrency can be more accessible to everyone: ##The Tradeoff Between Scaling and Decentralization Today, if you want to verify a transaction on a cryptocurrency, you need to first download a full copy of the blockchain. Izaak points out that this works fine in the early days of a network, but quickly becomes impractical over time as the blockchain becomes longer and grows in size to hundreds of gigabytes. ##A Succinct Blockchain Coda is a new cryptocurrency protocol that solves this problem by compressing the entire blockchain. Using the recursive composition of zk-SNARKs, Coda eliminates the need to store or download transaction history in order to verify the blockchain. Because this ‘succinct blockchain’ is more efficient than others, Iz