August 20, 2019
Dean joins us on Base Layer for an in-depth discussion on Agoric and it's not to be missed. Dean designed the negotiation process and contract for the first smart contracting system, AMiX which dates back to the 1980's. As a Principal Architect at Microsoft, he designed the Midori distributed object-capability operating system. While most smart contract platforms currently use an identity-based security architecture where access is granted based on the sender of a transaction, it has been shown that identity-based security architectures have issues. In contrast, Agoric uses an object capacity security architecture, in which access to a programming object itself is the authority to use the object. We discuss all these differences and why companies like Google and Salesforce are currently using these designs as well.
August 18, 2019
Roneil from Audius joins us on Base Layer for episode 60 and it's really a fun one! Aside from an exceptional career that has had stops at places like Kleiner and being early to the blockchain party, Roneil and team are focusing on a use case of blockchains - getting people who create content paid and removing a lot of excesses paid to the "middleman". We discuss how Audius is doing that for content creators and the technology stack involved in decentralizing what has been a legacy centralized system.
August 15, 2019
Akin from Decred joins us on Base Layer for a great overview of the project. Decred forked from the Bitcoin codebase when a proposal for new suite of features to be added to Bitcoin from Company 0 was rejected by the Bitcoin core team. Named btcsuite, these features became the core of the Decred project. Decred’s governance and consensus mechanism relies on a PoW/Proof-of-Stake (PoS) hybrid, which the project regards as a sort of “second authentication factor for consensus” by enabling coin holders to curb potential miner centralization, Decred employs a governance body called the Politeia to guide the project’s direction and fund operations from its treasury. We learn all about their special governance mechanisms and why people are talking about Decred.
August 12, 2019
Mike Belshe, the CEO and co-founder of BitGo, joins us for the next episode of Base Layer. BitGo, is one of the market leaders in institutional-grade cryptocurrency investment services. Mike is the driving force behind BitGo’s product and business strategy for delivering security, compliance, and custodial solutions for blockchain-based currencies. Prior to founding BitGo, Mike was one of the first engineers dedicated to building Chrome at Google. He is creator of the SPDY protocol and lead author of HTTP/2.0, the internet protocol responsible for loading web pages today. In 2003, Mike co-founded Lookout Software, an email search company acquired by Microsoft, and has held management positions at several startups including Netscape, Good Technology, and Critical Path. Mike and I talk the current state of custody and what the future has for it, insurance and custody and much more.
August 7, 2019
Alexander Zaidelson from Beam joins us on Base Layer for what I'm now calling "Privacy Week" after we had Monero on the episode prior. BEAM is a next generation confidential cryptocurrency based on an elegant and innovative Mimblewimble protocol. Users have complete control over privacy; user decides which information will be available and to which parties, having complete control over his/her personal data in accordance to his/her will and applicable laws. No addresses are stored in the blockchain; no information whatsoever about either the sender or the receiver of a transaction is stored in the blockchain. We discuss all of this, how it’s done (under the hood), discuss Pedersen commitments and much more.
August 4, 2019
Riccardo Spagni, the man, myth and legend at Monero joins us on Base Layer and it's a massive show! Not only is this a crash course in what Monero is for beginners it's also got updates and some great detail into what's happening at Monero. In addition this was a really important conversation as we've seen yet another massive data hack at a bank, with 100m records stolen. We discuss the tech that is involved in Monero (Ring signatures, RingCT and stealth addresses), commitments and much more. Also a great discussion for those trying to understand the differences in privacy coins like Monero to Bitcoin and Ethereum, among others. Listen and learn!
July 31, 2019
Jamie Burke, CEO of Outlier Ventures, joins us on Base Layer for an amazing chat about Web 3.0 and much more. OV is an early stage investment firm who also advises some very early projects, having developed a thesis called the Convergence Stack which, in my opinion, dissects the decentralized/distributed stack the best out of anyone so far. We talk about that, about a world that exists in addition to Bitcoin and much more.
July 28, 2019
Doug Petkanics joins us on Base Layer for a great overview of Livepeer which ~3/4th's of my guests have brought up a project to pay attention to! Doug is a multi-time Founder with Wildcard and Hyperpublic and has been focusing his attention for the last few years on Livepeer; live streaming services, such as YouTube and Twitch have seen tremendous growth in popularity in recent years. Broadcasting or building a streaming application however can be very expensive, as a result of payments to centralized transcoding and distribution companies. Livepeer aims to provide the infrastructure service layer for decentralized live video broadcasting. In doing so, it hopes to provide a cheaper, more scalable, censorship resistant solution that is more resilient without single points of failure. We talked about everything from the unplugging generation to their consensus methodologies and governance systems. Truly a great overview of a really important project.
July 25, 2019
Patrick, the Founder of Qtum ($300M Market Cap), joins us on Base Layer and there's a lot to unpack on this one. Qtum wants to harness the best attributes of the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains to create a decentralized, well-governed smart contracts platform with the potential to iterate on existing consensus mechanisms and other protocol parameters. Qtum believes proof-of-work blockchain protocols like suffer from categorical scaling limitations such that proof-of-stake is if only by default a viable consensus model. Qtum plans to build the first robust proof-of-stake UTXO-based smart-contract network. They also
have a Decentralized Governance Protocol which we discussed in addition to their full node count and more insight into their
x86 Virtual Machine which aims to support C, C++, Rust, Python and other widely used programming languages, facilitating mainstream adoption of smart contract development.
July 22, 2019
We welcome Dan and Ian on Base Layer to discuss the work they are doing at IDEO CoLab and their new Start-Up Studio. IDEO CoLab works very closely with their startups and projects; from 4-day sprints to multi-week projects, they start with an organization's hard problems and create experience prototypes that look 12+ months ahead of market. They also have some powerful corporate names behind them now including Fidelity, Deloitte and Amazon in addition to 50 new mentors they announced that range from some of the best investors in crypto to some of the best founders. In addition we also caught up with Dan to discuss #defi and his thesis around Superfluid Collateral. Not one to miss!
