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

We are joined by Ryan Zurrer, Principal and Venture partner, at Polychain capital. Polychain capital is a breakout crypto hedge fund with over $100 million in assets under management, and large investments in major crypto projects such as Dfinity, Polkadot, Filecoin and Vest. Ryan was the first person to join Olaf Carlson Wee in managing this fund. He built multiple companies in the wind energy industry prior to making a switch to the cryptocurrencies.

In this episode, we go behind the scenes of the Polychain success story. We get details on what crypto hedge funds are, how Polychain got started, reasons for its breakout success, its approach to blockchain investments and the current challenges of running a crypto hedge fund. Ryan also walks us through Polychain’s interest areas – Layer 1 blockchain protocols such as Filecoin, Dfinity and Polkadot; and financial derivative protocols. If you want to understand how some of the leading minds allocate capital at a large scale in the cryptocurrency industry, check out the episode.

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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/249

Until now, proposals to improve blockchain scalability have addressed the problem in one of two ways. One seeks to increase efficiency by optimizing the blockchain or improving the consensus algorithm. The other comes in the forms of layer-2 solutions such as payment channels or side chains.

However, none have addressed the core bottleneck to scalability: TCP/IP network limitations. Improving the speed at which blocks propagate through the network is the layer-0 problem few people consider when thinking about scaling.

Fundamentally, network bottlenecks are what prevent blockchains from increasing their transaction throughput. Raising the block size or reducing the time between blocks has devastating effects on usability as the probability of a fork increases. At a certain point, the blockchain simply breaks as forks occur faster than blocks can propagate to all validators.

Remarkably, the web figured out how to scale decades ago with the invention of Content Distributions Networks, or CDN. This is what enables platforms like YouTube to steam thousands of hours of video to hundreds of thousands of people every second. However, traditional centralized scaling solutions lack the privacy and censorship resistance necessary to serve the decentralized web.

We’re joined by Uri Klarman, CEO of bloXroute. Founded by a team of researchers and systems designers from Northwestern and Cornel University, including Emin Gün Sirer, bloXroute allows practically every blockchain network to “scale today.”

As a scalability infrastructure service, their Blockchain Distribution Network, or BDN, sits underneath blockchain networks. Anyone operating a miner can use the BDN without any changes to their consensus algorithm or protocol. By simply pointing their software to a bloXroute node, miners immediately benefit from propagation speeds orders of magnitude higher than the time which is currently required for blocks to be seen by all validators. This global network of servers is optimized to receive and stream massive amounts of transaction data to vast networks of nodes and miners.

While bloXroute relies on some level of centralization, it is provably neutral and cannot discriminate based on the contents, provenance or destination of a block. It also includes clever redundancy mechanisms which ensure availability in the event of an attack on the network.

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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/248

Since he started blogging as Two Bit Idiot in 2013, Ryan Selkis has been both industry insider and industry critic. Consistently calling out excesses and abuses, but also maintaining his sights on the long-term potential.

He recently founded Messari, a project that aims to bring more transparency and fairness to the industry. Messari has narrowed in on siloed, inaccurate and incomplete data as a key factor that allows insiders to profit at the expense of the public. We talked about the various ways in which Messari tackles that problem, ranging from a community-led effort to gather project data to the ambitious goal of a token-curated registry of stand-up projects.

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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/247

Privacy and scalability are arguably the most challenging issues blockchains face. Scalable privacy-preserving state machines are inherently difficult. While cryptocurrencies like Zcash have proven trustworthy for simple transactions, privacy in smart contract platforms is an entirely different animal.

We’re joined by Guy Zyskind, CEO of Enigma, a platform for scalable decentralized apps which preserves privacy. The Enigma network treats Ethereum smart contracts as “secret contracts” and can perform computations on encrypted data. Inputs are broken into pieces and distributed to network nodes which perform computations on a segment of the full data. Once returned to the Ethreum chain, data is reassembled and may be decrypted to reveal the result. Leveraging secure multi-party computation and Trusted Execution Environments (TEE), Enigma prevents a malicious actor from gaining access to the input data and the computation results.

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This episode is hosted by Sébastien Couture and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/246

Martin Becze is a researcher at Dfinity working on a next-generation “Blockchain Operating System” called Primea – a continuation of his work on the eWASM project from his time at the Ethereum Foundation. Primea is an actor based IPC layer intended for use with WebAssembly programs.

Martin first learned about Ethereum in 2014 and was immediately drawn into the possibilities opened by having a contracting virtual machines on a blockchain. While the EVM was impressive, Martin saw the possibility for greater usability and efficiency by using the new WebAssembly standards being created, and so led a team at the Ethereum Foundation in the creation of a new blockchain virtual machine, called eWASM. We learn about Martin’s experience on the eWASM project and how the limitations of backwards compatibility led him to begin writing a brand new execution environment from scratch, rethinking some of the core designs and mechanics of the EVM – this project became known as Primea. Martin explains many of the fundamental design shifts involved with the Primea platform, including his focus on using the actor-based model and object capabilities (and what these even mean!). He also lays out how the Primea platform fits into the larger design of the Dfinity blockchain.

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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/245