In the blockchain world, few people are as brave as Tim Swanson when it comes to busting hype. Tim’s unbiased, honest, and sometimes controversial opinions provide a refreshingly realistic view of blockchain adoption and applications of this technology by people and businesses. Cutting through the hype, the over-sold press releases ad the blind optimism of a completely decentralized economy, Tim’s insights provide a sobering look at the state of the blockchain.

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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/213

We were joined by Founder Adam Perlow and Developer Asher Manning of Zen, a public blockchain project focused on building a decentralized financial system. The core premise of Zen is that none of the public blockchain networks are focused on financial asset. Zen is aiming to fill that gap through a Bitcoin-like UTXO architecture that supports multiple asset and smart contracts to enforce complex ownership rules.

We talked through their original design choices, their use of formal verification, connection to Bitcoin and vision for a fully decentralized financial system.

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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/212

Neufund CEO Zoe Adamovicz joined us to discuss how Neufund is creating a platform to allow companies to sell tokens backed by actual company equity.

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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/211

Chaincode Labs Founder Alex Morcos joined us to discuss his journey, the role of the company in Bitcoin’s development and the views that drive his work.

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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/210

Scaling public blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum is a long standing technical challenge. In this episode, we cover Zilliqa which has pioneered a design to scale public blockchain throughput with the number of nodes by sharding the blockchain. Sharding has been hitherto proposed as a scaling technique by Ethereum. Zilliqa is one of the first projects to propose a concrete design with an operational testnet processing a couple thousand transactions per second across several shards.

Our guests, Xinshu Dong (CEO) and Amrit Kumar (Crypto Lead), walk us through the objectives, protocol design and fundraising structure of this innovative project. We also briefly cover Zilliqa’s novel approach to designing a smart contract language and execution environment.

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This episode is hosted by Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/209