Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies

Camila Russo is a financial journalist, starting her career writing for Chile's largest national newspaper. She then spent 8 years at Bloomberg covering the Argentine market from Buenos Aires, the European stocks from Madrid, and analysed macro emerging markets moves for the Markets Live blog in New York.

She is the founder of the Defiant and recently wrote and released a book on the foundations of Ethereum, “The Infinite Machine”. This tells the story of how 19-year-old coding genius Vitalik Buterin led a “ragtag group of feuding hackers with no business plan and no live product” to pioneer a whole new way of raising money, on a platform that’s grown to a value of $27 billion. It is being hailed a complete hit and we highly recommend you give it a read.

Camila joined us to chat about how her journey through journalism led her to crypto, and how she became a successful author.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Camila's background and how she got into the crypto space
• Becoming involved with Bitcoin in Argentina back in 2013
• Her move to the US and the introduction to Ethereum in 2017
• What made her decide to write a book and the process involved
• Some interesting stories that didn't make the final cut
• Camila's views on the Ethereum narrative and how it has changed over time
• Camila's view on the current DeFi situation and the risks of regulators becoming more involved
• What is The Defiant?
• How to follow Camila

Episode links:

• Camila Russo
• The Defiant
• The Infinite Machine
• Excerpt from The Infinite Machine
• “The Infinite Machine” review
• Camila on Twitter

Sponsors:

• Algorand: To learn more about Algorand and how it’s unique design makes it easy for developers to build sophisticated applications, visit algorand.com/epicenter - http://algorand.com/epicenter

This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/358

NuCypher is a decentralized threshold cryptography network offering interfaces and runtimes for secrets management and dynamic access control. It provides cryptographic infrastructure for privacy preserving applications and it exists as a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain. They are currently in testnet but once launched you will be able to use NuCypher to carry out proxy re-encryption.

Proxy re-encryption is a cryptographic method that allows you to delegate re-encryption of data to a third party and in this case validators in the NuCypher network. With this method you issue a re-encryption key that is assigned to a specific public key and a third party has the ability to re-encrypt data for that third party to decrypt. In this case the NuCypher network acts as the third party service. It is useful for when you want to share data, with the ability to revoke access at a later stage. 

They also have an interesting token distribution mechanism called the WorkLock. This is similar to a Lockdrop but with work required from the participants.

MacLane Wilkison, Co-founder and CEO of NuCypher talks about how and why the protocl was created, the challenges faced with it, and the problems it solves.

Topics covered in this episode:

- MacLane’s background and how he got into the blockchain space
- Challenges with working with corporate entities and getting people to understand privacy preserving technologies
- The zeroDB protocol and how that led to NuCypher
- What was MacLane’s goal with starting NuCypher
- What proxy re-encryption is and why it’s desirable over manual systems
- What are threshold signatures
- Attributability on the protocol
- Some use cases of using FHE on NuCypher and why they have chosen this for the protocol
- MacLane’s thoughts on trusted hardware
- The infrastructure of NuCypher and why it is on Ethereum
- Results from the testnet
- WorkLock - their token distribution mechanism and how it compares to Lockdrop
- How you can set up a node on NuCypher
- Current gas costs and the impact of this
- The NuCypher business model and how they make money
- Where to learn more about NuCypher

Episode links: 

- [NuCypher Website](nucypher.com)
- [NuCypher Discord](https://discord.com/invite/7rmXa3S)
- [NuCypher blog](https://blog.nucypher.com/)
- [WorkLock](https://blog.nucypher.com/the-worklock/)
- [NuCypher Twitter](https://twitter.com/NuCypher)
- [MacLane's Twitter](https://twitter.com/MacLaneWilkison)

Show notes and listening options: [epicenter.tv/357](https://epicenter.tv/357)

Gauntlet is a simulation platform for building financial models of blockchain protocols and applications. Their platform uses machine learning methods to simulate different environments with various user behaviors and see how the system holds up in those conditions. They perform analysis on things like core mechanisms to test for liveness, block propagation, and at higher layers like simulating markets. Their offering is complementary to security audits as their analysis goes beyond code functionality and looks at how systems may behave in real-life conditions.

Tarun Chitra, CEO & Founder of Gauntlet, talks about his previous life in chip manufacturing and how he built Gauntlet. He also goes deep into the machine learning and statistical analysis involved with Gauntlet. It is quite a fascinating concept and when applied to blockchain systems, there is huge potential for this to become something that is expected by users, investors, and the community for new protocols.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Tarun’s background and how he got into crypto
• Chip manufacturing in the US and its geopolitical implications
• What sorts of things does Gauntlet model?
• How does historical data play a part in predicting blockchain protocol behavior
• Simulation models used by Gauntlet
• Game design analysis
• The parts of the crypto economic stack that would benefit from this simulation work today
• How does Gauntlet complement a security audit for a new blockchain
• What tools they use for simulation
• What Gauntlet looks like as a business and what is the roadmap going forward

Episode links:

• Gauntlet website
• Gauntlet on Medium
• Tarun on Medium
• Tarun's papers
• Gauntlet on Twitter
• Tarun on Twitter

Sponsors:

• Algorand: To learn more about Algorand and how it’s unique design makes it easy for developers to build sophisticated applications, visit algorand.com/epicenter - http://algorand.com/epicenter

This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/356

Celo has a clear mission - to build a financial system that creates the conditions for prosperity, for everyone. The Celo Foundation is a non-profit organization that supports the growth and development of the open-source, decentralized Celo Platform. Its aim is to build a flexible network of applications built on a blockchain to facilitate payments and remittances to people’s phone numbers. Guided by the Celo community tenets, the Foundation contributes to education, technical research, environmental health, community engagement, and ecosystem outreach. These activities support and encourage an inclusive financial system that solves real-world problems such as lack of access to sound currency, or friction for cash-transfer programs aimed to alleviate poverty.

They are aiming to create a new platform to connect people globally and bring financial stability to those who need it most. Rene Reinsberg and Marek Olszewski, founders of Celo, talk about how they are using blockchain technology to achieve this.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Rene and Marek’s backgrounds and how they got into blockchain
• The history of Celo and its mission
• Some of the friction points with the project and how they have overcome them
• What Celo are doing differently than other networks
• How Celo are dealing with privacy issues
• Why they chose to build on the EVM
• The go-to-market strategy that Celo has chosen
• How cUSD works and how they deal with the scalability issue on the system
• As the reserve holds Bitcoin, how does the transfer of cUSD work?
• cUSD vs Maker
• The issuance protocol for transferring assets
• Host debrief

Episode links:

• Celo website
• The Celo blog
• cLabs announces acquisition of Summa
• Rethinking Remittances with Blockchain Technology and Celo
• Celo Dollars
• Plumo Channel on Discord
• Valora
• Celo on Twitter
• Rene on Twitter
• Marek on Twitter

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/355

Republic is an investment platform that allows anyone pretty much anywhere in the world, of any income and net worth, to invest in some of the best private equity startups. It allows regular people, not just a few wealthy accredited investors, to invest in highly vetted private startups, with as little as $10 or as much as $100,000 per investment.

In the past, accredited investors were the only ones allowed to invest in startups through equity-based incentives. However the JOBS Act of 2016 created an exemption under the federal securities laws so that crowdfunding can be used to offer and sell securities to the general public. Republic launched just after the JOBS Act was passed with a goal to create an investment platform which was truly accessible to everyone. This was around the time that companies began raising funds with ICOs, and Republic was among the first platforms to offer a framework for Security Token Offerings.

Republic has recently innovated again with their Republic Note product. This is a profit sharing token which allows investors to receive dividends when companies who raise money on the platform make an exit. The tokens are issued by Republic which distributes a portion of the exit profits to investors in proportion to their holdings. This is a similar model to the Binance Token, which isn't surprising since Republic was the first portfolio company of Binance Labs.

Ken Nguyen, Co-founder and CEO of Republic, explains the advantages of crowdfunding over traditional investing, the long term regulatory implications, and the opportunities this model opens up for startup funding.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Ken’s background and his history with AngelList
• The implications from the JOBS Act 2016
• Ken’s vision for Republic and making investment more accessible for more people
• Overview of the US Securities Law and investing
• The interaction between Republic and crypto
• The types of start-ups and investors using Republic
• The importance of the community aspect within start-ups on Republic
• The Republic Note token
• Republic Note’s Reg A offering and what the benefits of this will be
• Where Republic Note can be traded

Episode links:

• Republic website
• Republic on Medium
• Republic Note
• When will the Republic Note’s Reg A offering be qualified?
• Republic Twitter
• Ken Nguyen Twitter

This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/353

Republic is an investment platform that allows anyone pretty much anywhere in the world, of any income and net worth, to invest in some of the best private equity startups. It allows regular people, not just a few wealthy accredited investors, to invest in highly vetted private startups, with as little as $10 or as much as $100,000 per investment.

In the past, accredited investors were the only ones allowed to invest in startups through equity-based incentives. However the JOBS Act of 2016 created an exemption under the federal securities laws so that crowdfunding can be used to offer and sell securities to the general public. Republic launched just after the JOBS Act was passed with a goal to create an investment platform which was truly accessible to everyone. This was around the time that companies began raising funds with ICOs, and Republic was among the first platforms to offer a framework for Security Token Offerings.

Republic has recently innovated again with their Republic Note product. This is a profit sharing token which allows investors to receive dividends when companies who raise money on the platform make an exit. The tokens are issued by Republic which distributes a portion of the exit profits to investors in proportion to their holdings. This is a similar model to the Binance Token, which isn't surprising since Republic was the first portfolio company of Binance Labs.

Ken Nguyen, Co-founder and CEO of Republic, explains the advantages of crowdfunding over traditional investing, the long term regulatory implications, and the opportunities this model opens up for startup funding.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Ken’s background and his history with AngelList
• The implications from the JOBS Act 2016
• Ken’s vision for Republic and making investment more accessible for more people
• Overview of the US Securities Law and investing
• The interaction between Republic and crypto
• The types of start-ups and investors using Republic
• The importance of the community aspect within start-ups on Republic
• The Republic Note token
• Republic Note’s Reg A offering and what the benefits of this will be
• Where Republic Note can be traded

Episode links:

• Republic website
• Republic on Medium
• Republic Note
• When will the Republic Note’s Reg A offering be qualified?
• Republic Twitter
• Ken Nguyen Twitter

This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/353

SKALE Network's modular protocol is one of the first of its kind to allow developers to build application specific blockchains. These are interoperable and compatible with the Ethereum mainchain, and the entire Ethereum ecosystem. They provide the benefits of decentralization without compromising on computation, storage, or security.

The focus of SKALE Network is slightly different to other scaling solutions, many of which we have had on the show in the past. SKALE Network aims to scale smart contracts, not necessarily transaction throughput. Think of it as a highly performant Ethereum as a service side chain, where developers can deploy their own app specific blockchains. Within the scale network, their dapps will benefit from thousands of TPS with zero gas fees, and addons like file storage. In the future, it’s possible that SKALE will support other addons like machine learning.

Jack O'Holleran, CEO and Co-Founder of SKALE Labs, talks about how they are tackling the scaling issues on Ethereum.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Jack's background and how he got into cryptocurrency
• Jack's thoughts on the problem of scaling on Ethereum
• What is a SKALE node and how to start one
• Comparisons to Cosmos, Polkadot and Eth 2.0 sharding
• The SKALE Network
• The purpose of the SKALE Manager and how it interacts with validators and nodes
• Creating a dapp on the SKALE network
• What is the future of access to connectors - are stores an option?
• How security properties work on the network
• Who are the users of SKALE and how does one onboard to the network
• The NODE Foundation - the launch and grants available

Episode links:

• SKALE Labs Website
• SKALE Whitepaper
• SKALE Developers
• SKALE Discord
• The NODE Foundation
• SKALE Labs Twitter
• Jack Twitter

This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/352

Ampleforth is a cryptocurrency attempting to become an essential building block to an alternative financial ecosystem. The protocol’s native token, AMPL, is a non collateralized cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin, but with a twist: It is supply elastic. This means the token and protocol will automatically increase or decrease the quantity of tokens held in user wallets based on 24 hour weighted volume price. AMPL operates as an ERC-20 token on top of the Ethereum blockchain.

Some claim that the Ampleforth protocol’s implementation of “countercyclical” economic policy makes it a good complimentary collateral because they posit that this mechanism ought to give AMPL a low correlation to the likes of BTC and ETH. Others are not so sure: Does it really make a difference whether you have an inelastic supply without a target price, or an elastic supply with a target price of one? Is AMPL really not correlated to other types of collateral, and should this be so, does it even matter?

There has been a lot of chatter about Ampleforth in recent months. Is it legit, or is it a scam, 'HEX with Stanford credentials', as one pundit commented? We spoke with the co-founder Evan Kuo, who attempts to explain how it all works and straighten out misconceptions surrounding the protocol.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Evan’s background
• What is Ampleforth and its mission
• What is Ampleforth’s value proposition and the rules based system it uses
• How the rebasing works
• Slow traders vs fast traders
• Where profits from fast traders come from
• Using Ampleforth as base money
• Token distribution
• The integration hurdles with AMPL
• Does the community truly understand the protocol?

Episode links:

• Ampleforth website
• AMPL Talk
• AMPL Token Distribution
• Ampleforth White Paper
• Ampleforth Twitter
• Evan Kuo Twitter

This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/351

Balancer is a generalized automated market maker (AMM) protocol built on Ethereum. It allows anyone to create or add liquidity to customizable pools and earn trading fees. On one side there are liquidity providers (LPs) that generally seek to balance their holdings, and they get rewarded with trading fees. On the other side, traders that are looking for the best rate possible.

One way to look at Balancer is as a generalization of Uniswap, however Balancer pools aren't restricted to the same 50/50 split between 2 tokens. A Balancer pool can support up to 8 tokens with any weights. It supports smart order routing which ensures trades get sent to the pools which provide the best rate possible. They can be seen as self balancing index funds which pay you for contributing liquidity to the platform. Instead of paying fees to portfolio managers to rebalance your portfolio, you collect fees from traders, who continuously rebalance your portfolio by following arbitrage opportunities.

The inner workings are quite complex but CEO & Co-founder of Balancer, Fernando Martinelli, breaks down the token economics and governance of the protocol for us.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Fernando’s background and how he got into the space
• Balancer's connection to Maker
• An introduction to liquidity mining and some of the problems with this
• The connection to the Uniswap formula
• What Balancer is and how the protocol works
• How does this work as a Portfolio Management tool and how dynamic are the fees
• How smart pools wok - The network of pools and the offchain set up
• How the weighting system works on Balancer
• The options for users - keeping it simple and the data that is available in your Balancer account
• Governance tokens
• How the BAL token is designed and how it works
• How finance for the protocol is raised
• The future plan of dissolving Balancer
• How they plan to attract volume
• What’s coming up in Balancer V2

Episode links:

• Balancer Website
• Balancer White Paper
• Balancer Discord
• Balancer Blog
• Balancer Twitter
• Fernando Twitter

This episode is hosted by Sunny Aggarwal & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/350

UMA, or Universal Market Access, is an open source financial contracts protocol for building synthetic assets. It allows any two counterparties to design and create their own financial contracts for derivatives. An example of these assets in the traditional finance world, are interest rate derivatives. These are used to hedge against fluctuations in currency exchange rates. Today, interest rate derivatives are commonly used and the contracts to create these are standardized. Similarly, UMA allows anyone to create a derivative on a blockchain. Enforcement of agreement will be enforced by the network and so will settlement.

What’s unique about UMA is how it ensures proper collateralization of derivatives. Maker and other platforms based on collateralized positions use a price oracle and will automatically liquidate positions if they go below a certain threshold. UMA is ‘priceless’ and does not use an on-chain price feed as the primary means to determine proper collateralization. Rather, it incentivizes participants to identify improperly collateralized positions. UMA token holders essentially vote on the price.

Allison Lu, co-founder of UMA, chats in-depth about the platform and provides a great introduction to the world of financial derivatives.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Allison’s background and how she got into blockchain
• What derivatives are and how they work in the legacy financial system
• How the UMA protocol works
• How synthetic tokens are traded and fungibility
• Creating put options on the framework
• How does this compare to prediction markets
• UMA’s liquid mechanism
• Priceless synthetics
• What are the incentives on the protocol
• The importance of delayed reaction times
• How liquidation work and minting works
• How to prevent scamming
• The dispute process and corruption
• What makes the UMA protocol unique
• The UMA roadmap

Episode links:

• UMA Website
• UMA Docs
• UMA Github
• UMA Medium
• UMA Twitter
• Allison Lu Twitter

This episode is hosted by Sunny Aggarwal & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/349