DeCent People

Scott Lewis is one of the most reasoned voices you will find on Twitter opining on crypto-related issues, which is saying a lot. He's also the co-founder of Defi Pulse, a site that ranks decentralized finance protocols by an interesting and hard-to-game metric: how much money the platform has locked inside of it. A poker player and former derivatives trader, Lewis grew up in Nashville and honed his acute sense of fairness as a high school student there, a sense of fairness that would inform the rest of his career and what he chose to devote himself to once in crypto full time.

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Chris Giancarlo burst on to the crypto scene as Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission when he testified before Congress, addressing lawmakers not as a regulator, he said, but "as a dad." The moniker Crypto Dad was soon bestowed on him and he used it as the title for his recent book, CryptoDad, The Fight for The Future Of Money. We talk about Chris's early life, spending afternoons at a New York City jazz club as a kid, his journey through the law and to the CFTC. He's been working on The Digital Dollar Project for about two years now, an effort to educate lawmakers and regulators about the benefits of having the U.S. dollar in digital form. 

Buy CryptoDad here

The Digital Dollar Project white paper

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Tim Beiko leads the group of Ethereum developers who are working to upgrade the blockchain network in the biggest overhaul since it went live in 2015. The change will usher in a new consensus system that vastly improves Ethereum's energy efficiency and will pave the way for much faster transaction times. I spoke to Tim previously about his early life and how he got into Ethereum here, so today's episode focused on the progress toward ETH 2.0. 

You can learn more about the Ethereum All Core Devs team here

More on the Merge

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Erin Plante is the senior director of investigations and special projects at blockchain forensics firm Chainalysis. She's had a fascinating career in cyber security, including two stints in Hong Kong where she helped ferret out executives of Western corporations who may have been illegally bribing Chinese officials. Think clandestine, overnight work that imaged entire corporate digital libraries without leaving a trace. She also worked in Africa on corruption investigations where she first understood that cryptocurrency could alleviate the problem of migrant workers having to send bags of cash back to their families in other parts of the continent. At Chainalysis she's worked on fascinating investigations like combating Russian hackers who use the Bitcoin blockchain to ensure their malware never goes offline. 

Erin Plante on LinkedIn

Chainalysis's 2022 Crypto Crime Report

More on Chainalysis

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In this follow up episode we join Adam Jackson of Braintrust again to dive into how his firm uses a token to incentivize its freelancers to create a vibrant marketplace for temporary work. 

Here's the first part of the conversation with Adam

Learn more about the BRST token

The Braintrust white paper

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Ryan Selkis is one of the most outspoken advocates for the core beliefs of self-determination and stewardship that define the cryptocurrency movement. The co-founder of Messari, a digital asset data and analytics firm, Selkis is unafraid to take on regulators and politicians whom he views as being anti-crypto, such as Securities and Exchange Commissioner Gary Gensler and Senator Elizabeth Warren. We talk about his early days when sports took over his life, his time as the night janitor at his college basketball arena, how the financial crisis affected his plans to work for JPMorgan and what it was like to help Coindesk get on the right track. He also reiterates his sharp criticism of Gensler and Congressional inaction with regard to crypto regulation. 

Here's the Messari 2022 annual report Selkis wrote

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More on Messari

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Georgio Constantinou is a name you might not know, but you should. He's behind the scenes on some of the coolest stuff that's going on in music NFTs at the moment. He co-founded Six, a digital agency that helps artists navigate the web3 world, with the musician RAC and Jesse Grushack of Ujo Music and ConsenSys fame. Along the way, Six has helped Eminem buy a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT and helped broker the sale of the one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album Once Upon A Time in Shaolin from the U.S. government to PleasrDAO. We talk about Georgio's early life, how music management is an art form unto itself and how what it was like to hear the elusive Wu Tang album. 

Georgio on Twitter

More on the Wu-Tang saga

PleasrDAO

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Doug Petkanics is co-founder of Livepeer, a decentralized video processing service that utilizes unused video processing space. We talk about troubling developments in regulation that are seeking to put pressure on peer-to-peer systems like non-custodial wallets, how a service like Livepeer is seeking to sidestep those issues and how the vision for web3 deservedly faces criticism today but is aiming for real change. 

More on Livepeer

Doug on Twitter

More on the troubling developments in Canada

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Jess Sloss is one of the founders -- he calls himself an "instigator" -- of Seed Club, a collective that helps people create social tokens to run decentralized projects. A native of Canada, Jess comes from a family of entrepreneurs and is one of the nicest, most generous and knowledgeable people in web3 that you will come across. He speaks about how he learned he definitely didn't want to follow in his father's footsteps in the gardening business and how growing up in the 1990s with the early Internet led him into tech. Seed Club runs an accelerator program to help projects explore how they can use web3 tools to reimagine how commercial organizations can be built, in many cases leading the the formation of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).

Here's Jess on Twitter

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Anthony Sassano is the host of the Daily Gwei, a Monday to Friday recap of all the big news in Ethereum. A native of Australia, Anthony finally found purpose in his life when he discovered the Ethereum community and hasn't looked back since. 

Subscribe to the Daily Gwei YouTube channel

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