Base Layer

Michael Dunworth, Wyre Co-Founder and CEO joins Base Layer to discuss what their 6 year old company is up to these days. For both individuals and enterprises alike, transferring money internationally serves as one of the most practical use cases for blockchain technology. By accelerating the speed and reducing the cost of international payments, blockchain can help businesses at every scale operate more efficiently and drive substantial spikes in revenue. Wyre uses proprietary blockchain technology to complete cross-border payments, cutting the time and expenses traditionally tied to banks and other financial institutions. While banks take up to 3 days and charge between 4-6% for international money transfers, Wyre completes transactions in less than six hours, charging less than 1%.

Muneeb Ali joins us on Base Layer to break down why Internet 1.0 is "broken", how we got to where we are, what Blockstack is, how it can scale and be performant and much more. Muneeb earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Mathematics from Lahore University of Management Sciences in 2003. He then went on to pursue graduate studies at Princeton University, from which he obtained a Master of Arts in Computer science in 2011, followed by a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science in 2017. Muneeb co-founded Blockstack with Ryan Shea in 2013 while enrolled at Princeton, and the company partook in the Y Combinator Summer 2014 cohort.

A special episode of Base Layer with Silvio Micali and Steven Kokinos from Algorand. Algorand removes the technical barriers that for years undermined mainstream blockchain adoption: decentralization, scale, and security. Their consensus mechanism is permissionless and pure proof-of-stake. It ensures full participation, protection, and speed within a truly decentralized network. Silvio, on the faculty at MIT, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, since 1983, is the co-inventor of probabilistic encryption, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, Verifiable Random Functions and many of the protocols that are the foundations of modern cryptography. Steven, a serial entrepreneur, most recently co-founder and Executive Charmain of Fuze, where he was responsible for corporate strategy. This is one not to miss!

In one of the most important episodes on Base Layer to date we speak with Marcos Veremis, Managing Director at Cambridge Associates. CA, as of 2018, had $389 billion in assets under advisement of some of the largest endowments, family offices and pensions. They are considered in many ways the gold standard for investment consulting, outsourced portfolio solutions, research services and tools and performance monitoring across various asset classes. In Q1 of 2019 Marcos and his team published Cryptoassets: Venture into the Unknown; a paper detailing "although the crypto industry remains in its infancy, we think institutional investors should begin exploring it" - an amazing statement from the likes of CA. We discuss the paper, the work that went into it, why they wrote it and what the future may look like in the space.

Tim joins Base Layer to discuss Staked and the state of the state of cryptoasset staking. Tim has spent 20 years starting and operating technology companies. Most recently, Tim founded Y-Combinator-backed Think Gaming, a SaaS data platform focused on mobile games. Staked operates the most secure, performant, and cost-effective block production nodes for decentralized PoS protocols on behalf of institutional investors. We learn about the competition in Staking as a Service, the yields, margins and much more.

A 2-1 episode with one of the most sought after founders and investors in crypto - Joey Krug. We discuss Augur first, the prediction marketplace he helped found that is providing a new way for people to use the Wisdom of the Crowd to predict outcomes of political events, event hedges, weather forecasts and much more. We then delve into what investment themes Joey and the team at Pantera and working this year into 2020 - focusing more on scalability issues to make blockchains run more optimally.

Alexander Skidanov from NEAR Protocol joins us on Base Layer for a not to miss episode. NEAR is a scalable smart contract platform that supports decentralized applications of almost any kind. Alexander is a highly accomplished developer starting at Microsoft and became Engineer #1 at memSQL. We discuss what NEAR is building in relation to language type, sharding, consensus methodologies and much more. Do not miss this one!

Sky Guo joins us on Base Layer to discuss how Cypherium is a highly scalable and robust smart contract platform. Their hybrid design features a joint Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus mechanism that can achieve thousands of transactions per second without sacrificing decentralization. We discuss enterprise adoption of blockchain and much more.

On the 30th episode of Base Layer we have Tyler Spalding, Co-Founder of Flexa which aims to enable retailers to take control of their own payments by reducing costs, overhead, and fraud through frictionless, instantaneous, and reliable blockchain-based settlement; and Lasse Clausen, Founding Partner at 1KX, a token angel fund with the thesis of extrapolating Bitcoin's success to embed cryptoeconomic incentives into everything; transactions, computation, storage, prediction, power.