Epicenter - Learn About Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin And Distributed Technologies

Epicenter turned 5 years old this month – that’s a long time in the blockchain space! When the podcast began in January 2014, the entire ecosystem was made up of only Bitcoin and a handful of altcoins. Soon after, the Ethereum white paper was published which ushered in a new era of crypto assets and decentralized applications. Since then, we have released 270 episodes and interviewed some of the leading thinkers, entrepreneurs, and engineers in the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry. Needless to say, we have learned a lot about the blockchain industry, but also what it takes to run a successful podcast in this space. This week, we look back on the early days of Epicenter and how the podcast has evolved over the years. We also answer your questions in our first ever AMA. Finally, we take stock of 2018 and the trends that marked this past year. Thank you to our sponsors for their support: Deploy enterprise-ready consortium blockchain networks that scale in just a few clicks. More at aka.ms/epicenter. This

We’re joined by Joseph Lubin, Founder and CEO of ConsenSys. Joseph founded ConsenSys as an Ethereum development studio on the heels of the Ethereum crowd sale in 2014. The company has since grown to a distributed organization of over 1,000 people. Over 50 companies and projects have emerged from ConsenSys, including Metamask, uPort, Gnosis, and GitCoin, to name only a few. Today, the company continues to invest in growing the Ethereum ecosystem by funding projects, and through consulting services for companies and institutions. Topics covered in this episode: Joseph’s background working as a technologist in the financial industry How he discovered Bitcoin in 2011 What lead Joseph to meet Vitalik Buterin and the founding Ethereum team How he founded ConsenSys and the company’s vision The company’s impressive growth and output The recent round of layoffs at ConsenSys How he thinks blockchain can change the world for the better His advice to companies feeling the pressure of the current bear market Joseph visit

When token sales and ICOs took off in 2017, most projects chose to push ahead despite large regulatory risks. One of the few that went the other direction and put compliance first was CoinList. The platform made its debut by running the massive Filecoin token sales in which $205m was raised from accredited investors. CoinList also played a major role in popularizing the SAFT and creating tools to efficiently and legally raise in the US. We were joined by CoinList President and Co-founder Andy Bromberg to discuss the history of CoinList, token sales, securities regulation and the potential of security tokens. Topics covered in this episode: How Andy became interested in Bitcoin and co-founded the Stanford Bitcoin Club The Filecoin token sale and CoinList’s genesis story CoinList’s due diligence for listing projects Why they created a whitelabel token sale offering The regulatory framework under which CoinList token sales take place The logic behind the SAFT (Simple Agreement for Future Tokens) How a token cou

Lending is one core pillar of the economy, enabling one person or company to be entrepreneurial with someone else’s capital. However, in the traditional banking system processes in lending are often opaque and the barrier to entry into this market is high. The emergence of easy to use Decentralized Finance is one of the hallmarks of 2018: To date, DeFi has brought us crypto-collateralized stable coins, decentralized exchanges, tokenized credit default swaps, trustless derivatives, and decentralized margin lending. We’re joined Nadav Hollander, co-founder and president of Dharma. Dharma is a decentralized protocol for credit products which connects debtors with creditors through a transparent mechanism. The protocol itself is agnostic towards the collateral and terms used, however, the team recently introduced a crypto-collateralized margin lending application running on top of the Dharma protocol, Dharma Lever. Topics covered in this episode: Nadav’s background and how he became interested in both blockchain

Since the rise of digital currencies and cryptocurrencies, central banks are considering the role these new forms of money may play in our evolving digital economy. One of the ideas studied is the notion of a central bank digital currency. While people and companies can hold central bank liabilities in the form of cash, only licensed banks have access to digital cash accounts with central banks. We’re joined by David Andolfatto, VP of Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. David was previously on the podcast to discuss his idea for Fedcoin, a central bank issued cryptocurrency. In a recent paper, he explores the impact central bank digital currencies may have on the monopolistic banking sector. Topics covered in this episode: The state of central bank research on digital currencies and cryptocurrencies The idea that central banks may hold Bitcoin reserves David’s new paper on the impact of central bank digital currencies (CBDC) The potential impacts of CBDC’s on the banking sector and our economy

While trustless interactions on Ethereum are native to the protocol, trustless interactions between the Ethereum blockchain and other blockchains are difficult to implement. Interoperability protocols heavily rely on atomic swaps, which typically come with a free option problem. For this episode we’re joined by James Prestwich, CEO at Summa. Summa designs and implements cross-chain financial contracts and instruments such as swaps, options, futures, and auctions. Summa recently conducted a dutch auction spanning the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains: Ethereum NFTs were auctioned off trustlessly to bidders on the Bitcoin network. We also discuss Riemann, a framework for deploying transaction scripts to UTXO-based chains, as well as the advantages of the predictability of transactions in UTXO-based chains and how to bring some of those advantages to Ethereum smart contracts. Topics covered in this episode: James background in Japanese and how he became interested in blockchain James contributions to Bitcoin Scr

We enter dozens of trust relationships ever time we interact with the Web. Browsers, ISPs, DNS providers, cloud hosting companies, all the way down to the handful of people who control certificate root keys; we rely on the integrity of these intermediaries to serve reliable, and accurate information. The concentration of power by any one of these actors threatens to compromise the very foundational principles of the Web. Decentralized technologies, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tor, and IPFS seek to reverse this trend. We’re joined by Nick Sullivan, Chief Cryptographer at Cloudflare. Founded less than 10 years ago, the company offers content delivery services (CND), DNS, and DDoS protection to over 12 million websites. The company contributes to open source cryptography libraries, some of which are used by Etherum. They recently launched an IPFS gateway and features which allow users to have strong guarantees as to the integrity of the content. Topics covered in this episode: Nick’s background as a cryptographer a

The Ethereum vision has always been to create a world computer. But its scalability and performance limitations have meant that it has fallen far short of that vision. Yet, work on scaling Ethereum has exploded in breadth and complexity over the past years. From variants of PoS, to Plasma / Plasma Cash, sharding, EWASM, BLS signatures, everything has been on the table. While confusing on the surface, underneath a coherent vision for a new Ethereum that will scale near infinitely has emerged. We were joined by Ethereum Researcher Justin Drake to discuss the Ethereum Serenity vision, its core components and the roadmap ahead. A particular focus was the beacon chain, the role of randomness and Verifiable Delay Functions. Topics covered in this episode: Justin’s previous project building on top of Open Bazaar Why he made the switch from application development to Ethereum consensus research The high-level vision for Ethereum 2.0 / Serenity The Ethereum Serenity roadmap to scaling the world computer by 1m times T

Most observers of the ecosystem will probably agree that 2015-2017 were the years of the enterprise blockchain. It was during that time that many startups catering to enterprise were founded and funded, including Monax and Stratumn (where Brian and Sebastien previously worked). For the permissioned blockchain camp, adoption would come in the form of enterprise use cases, arguing that public networks carried too much risk, and lacked needed features like privacy. While much of the hype has subsided, large companies in every sector are forming consortia and leveraging blockchain to provide better process traceability and transparency, and reduce their reliance on third parties. We’re joined by Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director of Hyperledger. When Brian was last on the show, he had recently started his role at the Linux Foundation. Now, two years later, Hyperledger has gone from a nascent project to a mature ecosystem of technologies with hundreds of members. With dozens of networks in production, and backed

The difficulties of compensating content creators for their work has been a driving force of the web for decades. It gave rise to advertising-driven tech giants like Google and Facebook and contributed to the decline of industries like music and publishing. Coil aims to change this and leverage blockchain and the Interledger Protocol to build a new business model for the web. We were joined by Coil Founder and former Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas and Coil Co-Founder Ben Sharifian to discuss their ambitions to change how content is consumed and paid for. Topics covered in this episode: What web monetization is The difference between web monetization and web payments The negative effects of advertising-driven business models What the Interledger Protocol (ILP) is The current state of ILP Why Stefan and Ben decided to leave Ripple and start Coil The case for web monetization as an initial use case for Coil The idea of users paying a fixed bandwidth per second to content creators Possible user experiences that could

It’s that time of year again, Devcon time! Just as the conference was wrapping up, we sat down at the Prague Congress Center for a Devcon4 recap. Join Brian, Friederike, Sebastien, and a surprise guest host as we share our thoughts on the event, and how the Ethereum ecosystem has evolved since we last met in Cancun. Topics covered in this episode: Devcon4 compared to Devcon3 Changes to the Ethereum Foundation management Serenity (Ethereum 2.0) roadmap The shift from HODL to BUIDL The apparent departure of ICOs from the landscape The growth of grant programs Brian’s talk at the Generalized Mining panel This year’s emphasis on security Web3 Summit in Berlin the previous week Episode links: Devcon4 website Devcon3 recap episode from Cancun Thank you to our sponsors for their support: Simplify your hiring process & access the best blockchain talent . Get a $1,000 credit on your first hire at toptal.com/epicenter. Deploy enterprise-ready consortium blockchain networks that scale in just a few clicks. More

From one of the main Ethereum clients, to Polkadot to Substrate; Parity has become exceptional at developing successful open-source blockchain projects. Their latest effort Substrate provides a framework to easily create custom blockchains. Building on cutting-edge technologies like Web Assembly, Substrate also offers automated on-chain upgrades. We were joined by Gavin Wood, who was previously co-founder and CTO of Ethereum and founded Parity. We talked about the early Ethereum days, how Parity got started, Substrate, Polkadot and his views on on-chain governance. Topics covered in this episode: The genesis story of Ethereum Why Gavin prefers reasoning from first principles to reading How Parity shunned Silicon Valley principles to build an developer-driven company Why they decided to work on a scalable blockchain from scratch instead of improving Ethereum An overview of Substrate The relationship between Substrate and Polkadot How Substrate allows switching consensus in a live blockchain Why Ethereum’s gov

We’re joined by Monica Quaintance, Head of Engineering and Adoption at Kadena. While most companies providing enterprise solutions focus primarily on permissioned systems, Kadena is building both a public network protocol and private blockchain infrastructure. Their Chainweb protocol will soon launch as a public network and smart contract platform. The company claims their novel approach to proof of work offers enormous gains on transaction throughput, even at scale, while benefiting from the same security as Bitcoin. Alongside Chainwebs, Kadena is building a permissioned protocol more suited for enterprise applications in insurance and finance. Topics covered in this episode: Monica’s background at the SEC The genesis of Kadena and why the founders left JP Morgan Kadena’s unique approach to building both public and permissioned protocols The Chainweb protocol and it’s approach to proof of work The incentive mechanisms in Chainweb How Chainweb protects itself against common attack vectors The PACT smart cont

Building open source software is a collaborative process which relies on good faith and willingness of volunteers. While most of the software we use daily relies heavily on open-source libraries, incentive models are broken. Repo maintainers are eager to see their projects evolve, but have little leverage to encourage developers to contribue. And projects contributors create enormous value by dedicating their time and expertise while getting little in return. Both open and closed-source projects utilize bountied to source engineering talent. Combined with blockchain technologies, there is a potential to create efficient, two-sided markets which align incentives for all participants. We’re joined by Kevin Owocki, who is the Founder of Gitcoin. The Ethereum-based platform leverages the open source community to incentivize and monetize work, remunerating developers for pull requests made to projects. Gitcoin was itself built using Gitcoin and is today facilitating bug bounty payments for dozens of blockchain pro

CoinFund is one of the earliest crypto-funds to have taken shape, forming in early 2016. The fund is well known for running an active Community Slack, conducting great podcast interviews with cryptocurrency projects and an emphasis on building network nodes / services. We are joined by Jake Brukhman, CEO, and Alexander Bulkin, Chief Alchemist, to discuss their latest thoughts on investing in the cryptocurrency space. We cover a wide variety of themes such as their opinions on the “fat protocol hypothesis,” thesis on value capture in the cryptocurrency space, their efforts to build network nodes; and their effort to build an open source token-less technology that allows entrepreneurs to launch their blockchains. Topics covered in this episode: Coinfund’s history What is a cryptofund? Coinfund approach to investing in the cryptocurrency space Generalised mining – what it is, and how it offers cryptofunds a competitive advantage The ADAPT toolkit – a tokenless toolkit for rapid blockchain innovation Episode li

The Tezos whitepaper, published in 2014, anticipated several areas that would become major issues for blockchain networks. Especially around governance and smart contract security, Tezos proposed original solutions. The project later went on to raise $232m in the biggest token sale at the time. Recently, the Tezos network launched as the first of a wave of innovative next-generation blockchain networks. We were joined by Tezos co-founders Arthur and Kathleen Breitman to discuss the history of the project, how the network functions today and how it could develop going forward. Topics covered in this episode: What inspired the original Tezos vision from 2014 The critical importance of formal verification and governance Why Arthur thinks the blockchain scalability problem is overrated The case against decentralized applications Why the ability to evolve and adopt new features is critical for Tezos success Tezos’ Proof-of-Stake and emerging baking ecosystem The Tezos Foundation drama and Johann Gevers The relati

Public blockchains produce enormous amounts of data. In theory, anyone can access the raw contents of transaction and blocks. In practice, however, querying blockchains can prove to be a daunting task. The difficulty lies in the fact that blockchains are particular types of distributed databases and thus carry several limitations. Most, if not all, blockchains lack the most basic SQL querying capabilities supported by nearly every off-the-shelf database system. Take Bitcoin as an example. Its API lacks even the most basic calls which would allow a user to query any address and receive the balance. In order to achieve this, block explorers and alike have developed sophisticated middleware infrastructure that parses the blockchain, normalizes the data, and stores it in a database, where it can be queried. In the best of cases, companies offer API calls for only a limited set of operations. Google hopes to change this by freeing blockchain datasets. We’re joined by Allen Day, Science Advocate at Google’s Singapo

The expectation has become widespread that blockchains will end up underpinning major societal infrastructures. The narrative in the blockchain space is that networks are decentralized and trustless and thus regulation should not apply to networks directly. Legal scholar Angela C. Walch has been questioning terms like decentralization and trustlessness and argues that blockchains shift the need for trust rather than remove it. Her controversial ideas include that key developers of open-source project should be treated as fiduciaries and held accountable for the consequences of their work. Angela Walch is a professor of law at St Mary University School of Law and a Research Fellow at the Center for Blockchain at UCL. She is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School and has been doing academic work on legal issues surrounding public blockchains since 2013. Topics covered in this episode: How she became interested in Bitcoin and issues around the narratives of decentralization and trustlessness How h

Legendary scientist and cryptography pioneer Ralph Merkle joined us to discuss his recent paper on DAOs. Merkle examined how the voting mechanisms in today’s democracies are flawed and how a decentralized, transparent DAO making decisions using prediction markets could create more efficient democratic systems. Topics covered in this episode: Merkle proofs, Merkle Roots and his early forays into cryptography Blockchains as living organisms Why DAOs will be subject to a Darwinian evolutionary process Why voting is flawed and we need new governance methods to save democracy The concept of a DAO democracy How prediction markets and futarchy would help govern a DAO democracy Episode links: Ralph Merkle DAO Democracy Paper [PDF] Ralph Merkle's Homepage Ralph Merkle's Wikipedia page Episode 98 with Robin Hanson on futarchy & prediction markets Tim Urban: Why Cryonics Makes Sense Alcor - Life Extension Foundation Thank you to our sponsors for their support: The open, decentralized trading protocol for ERC20

The rise of populism and increasing inequality have led to widespread questioning of democracy and capitalism. Glen Weyl, a political economist and Principal Researcher at Microsoft, along with legal scholar Eric Posner, published a book called ‘Radical Markets’. Radical Markets explores how restructuring property rights and voting systems could lead to more efficient markets and a more just society. Glen joined us to discuss the book and why the blockchain space is a fertile testbed to explore these radical new ideas. Topics covered in this episode: Why blockchain is on a trajectory to exacerbate inequality and fail at improving the world Why property should be seen as a monopolistic institution How property rights create inefficient markets The radical idea of transforming property rights via a Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax (COST) How the one-person-one-vote system contributed to the crisis of democracy How quadratic voting works and leads to fairer outcomes Whether or not buying of votes should be al