Chorus One Podcast

On the show today, we have Bijan Sharohki, Head of Product and Brandon Case, Head of Product Engineering from O1 labs, the development company working on Mina. Mina is the first protocol to use recursive zero-knowledge proofs to track the entire state of a blockchain. Using zero-knowledge proofs to track states rather than a full ledger of transactions, Mina is able to keep their blockchain to a fixed size of ~22kb. Mina enables a new category of applications called 'Snarkified Applications' or 'Snapps'. Snapps get executed once by developers and thereafter nodes verify associated SNARK proofs, making these new types of applications highly scalable on Mina's recursive blockchain. Snapps are going live on testnet by the end of 2021, so we caught up with Brandon and Bijan to discuss what problems Snapps can solve that dApps as they exist today can't solve. The podcast forays into how Mina snarks can be used as a bridging tool, the dynamics of their snarketplace and future Mina scaling solutions, plus so much more.

On the show today, we have Arjun Bhuptani, founder of Connext. Connext is an interoperability network, which is going to market with NXTP, a non-custodial cross-chain protocol. Connext is trustless, meaning there is no trust placed in external validators outside 2 native blockchains where a cross-chain transaction is occurring. Connext makes use of 'routers', which are nodes that facilitate cross-chain transfers and hold liquidity of different assets on multiple chains. If a user wants to move from Chain A to Chain B, they would signal their desired route to Connext network. Connext then broadcasts a user's desired route across chains for routers to submit the best price they can give the user (like Uber). A user would then receive the cheapest route possible to transfer their assets across chains, from routers that have the most available liquidity and most competitive fees. We talk to Arjun about the trustlessness nature of Connext, how it locally verifies transactions versus other possible models, how routers facilitate transfers, the intricate economics of Connext, how Connext ecosystem actors interact with each other, plus so much more.

On the show today, we have Hendrik Hofstadt, director of digital assets at Jump Trading and core contributor to Wormhole. Wormhole is a simple, generic protocol that delivers a pathway for any kind of information—funds, votes, programs and more—from any blockchain in the network to any other. In short, Wormhole acts as a notary that allows message passing between networks. Recently, Wormhole announced they would launch version 2 of their network, which will go-live connecting four networks - Ethereum, Terra, Solana and Binance Smart Chain. Wormhole has a set of 19 validators known as guardians, which attest to finalised chain state in a p2p network that is verifiable. 19 guardians publish a signature if they see a finalised message being posted on a network and Wormhole network aggregates the signatures to produce verifiable action approvals to be consumed on other networks. In a way Wormhole acts as a light client itself on networks it connects to. This podcast is a deep-dive into one of the hottest networks of 2021, tune-in to hear all about the origin story, the intricacies of the network, how it can be used, what's to come in the future and so much more.

On the show today we have Brent Xu, founder of Umee. Umee is a suite of cross-chain DeFi protocols that interconnects between Cosmos and Ethereum. Umee takes inspiration from Brent's experience in DeFi, Proof-of-Stake and Fixed Income. Umee has 3 core products at launch, multichain staking, cross-chain DeFi rates and interchain leverage. The podcast explores Brent's background in TradFi and some TradFi concepts such as the term structure of interest rates and covers how Umee is bringing a lot of TradFi concepts to DeFi such as a term structure of interest rates. We discuss everything from why time-values are important in crypto, Umee 2-token model for cross-chain lending/borrowing, how Umee builds yield curves for staking rates and much more.

On the show today, we have Sergey Gorbunov, co-founder of Axelar. Axelar network is a decentralized state machine responsible for facilitating cross-chain requests. Axelar's gateway protocol is a delivery and routing protocol that can work with any arbitrary blockchain regardless of consensus. This means any decentralised network can plug-in to Axelar seamlessly to access liquidity amongst other things from all other decentralised networks. Axelar also gives developers the freedom to connect their dApp into external networks that might have been previously inaccessible to them without redesigning the smart contracts. The show with Sergey covers his previous experience, how Axelar is different from Cosmos and Polkadot, what validators do for the network, their solution for scaling threshold cryptography and their vision for an interoperability network that is consensus and state transition agnostic.

Joining Felix Lutsch and Xavier Meegan on the show today we have Dean Tribble, co-founder and CEO of Agoric Systems. Agoric is a developer-friendly environment and economy for expressible, programmable, composable and secure smart contracts. Agoric aims to be a platform that offers developers a secure version of Javascript to deploy smart contracts safely into. Agoric's own network encourages cooperative economic activity using two tokens, RUN (a stablecoin) and BUILD (a staking token). The Agoric economy uses novel incentives to promote the safe execution of smart contracts in a stable economy. We speak to Dean about using Javascript to enhance security of smart contracts, the pros and cons of composability, the minimal set of market institutions to run a smooth economy and why paying for execution of rent and postage using a stablecoin is critical for economic accounting and interoperability.

On the show today we have Eric Chen, co-founder and CEO of Injective Protocol. Injective is an EVM-compatible, interoperable order-book based decentralised exchange that acts as a layer-2 sidechain, built using Tendermint-based consensus. Injective's canary-chain phase 2 mainnet recently went live earlier in July, which introduced staking and governance to the network. Injective's Governance has already passed the activation of spot market trading and is likely to enable derivative trading soon. We caught up with Eric to discuss Injective's go-to-market strategy, the mechanism for proposing arbitrary markets using governance, how Injective improves price discovery for liquid staking assets, their unique usage of yield boosting for community participation, institutional interest in Injective and much more.

On the show today we have Derek Yoo, CEO of PureStake and co-founder of Moonbeam. Moonbeam is a Polkadot parachain designed for developers that combines full Ethereum compatibility with the power of Polkadot. Moonbeam uses another network known as Moonriver to test and verify code under real economic conditions on Kusama. Moonriver won the second-ever parachain auction on Kusama just days ago and is now producing blocks. We have Derek on to discuss Moonriver's winning auction on Kusama, the tangibility of community on Polkadot, why some projects choose to deploy on Kusama and not Polkadot, upcoming plans in store for Moonbeam, plus so much more.