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

As the summer tour of European crypto conferences landed in Berlin, one of crypto’s cradles, we couldn’t miss DappCon 25, where we got to sit with Jerome de Tychey, Nixorokish & Joshua Dávila to discuss Ethereum’s restructure and whether its culture is still relevant to the wider crypto community. Join us for a fascinating discussion on the impact of crypto politicization and how Ethereum’s ecosystem evolved amidst a society with ever-changing values.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Jerome, Nixorokish & Josh backgrounds
• Ethereum Foundation restructuring
• Ethereum’s culture & crypto politicization
• DAOs & the evolution of Ethereum’s ecosystem
• Is privacy still a societal value?
• User experience & account abstraction
• Future hopes for Ethereum

Episode links:

• Jerome de Tychey on X
• Nixorokish on X
• Joshua Davila on X
• DappCon on X

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
• Chorus One: one of the largest node operators worldwide, trusted by 175,000+ accounts across more than 60 networks, Chorus One combines institutional-grade security with the highest yields at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.

Bitcoin remains an untapped source of net-new liquidity that could be injected into DeFi. This would completely reshape Bitcoin’s utilization from a mere store of value to a liquid asset that can be ported cross-chain and traded like a liquid staking derivative. Lombard’s LBTC builds upon Babylon’s Bitcoin staking primitive and aims to unlock new yield sources for the industry’s leading asset by increasing its DeFi utilization.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Jacob’s background
• Lessons gathered from Polychain
• Focusing on Bitcoin
• Why Bitcoin staking is crucial for BTC DeFi
• Building on top of Babylon
• LBTC minting
• Sources of BTC yield
• PoS inflation and native token incentives
• BTC as a trading pair in DeFi
• Lombard chain
• Future challenges to overcome
• Bitcoin L2s
• Lombard milestones

Episode links:

• Jacob Phillips on X
• Lombard on X
• Babylon on X

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
• Chorus One: one of the largest node operators worldwide, trusted by 175,000+ accounts across more than 60 networks, Chorus One combines institutional-grade security with the highest yields at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.

Apart from incentivising market participants to secure the network through inflationary rewards, many consider staking as an equivalent of stock dividend yield. As a result, although Bitcoin is regarded as digital gold, protocols are looking for ways to increase its utilisation in DeFi and, ultimately, generate yield. Nowadays, while newer networks are struggling to attract investors and sustain a healthy, decentralised validator set, more established blockchains capture the lion’s share of PoS actors. However, in a constant race for profit basis points, centralised consolidation of stakers seems inevitable. Join us for a fascinating discussion on the staking landscape and the challenges it may present to decentralisation.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Increasing BTC utilization through BTC yield
• Looping yield products
• The maturation of the staking market
• Chorus One staking portfolio
• How to prevent staking consolidation
• Retail vs. institutional-grade operators
• Symbiotic, Eigenlayer & restaking yield

Episode links:

• Mirko Schmiedl on X
• Tobias Jung on X
• Staking Rewards on X

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
• Chorus One: one of the largest node operators worldwide, trusted by 175,000+ accounts across more than 60 networks, Chorus One combines institutional-grade security with the highest yields at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sebastien Couture.

After a decade of existence, Ethereum has gone a long way from its initial whitepaper, yet many efforts in scaling and finding product-market-fit have been severely criticized for falling short of their promise. However, despite numerous other ‘Ethereum killers’ being launched over the years, none has managed to attract so many developers and liquidity while sticking true to ethos that (once) powered and united this industry. This year’s ETHPrague plans to confront exactly these existential challenges and steward community culture towards addressing outside criticism and external reality checks. Ethereum’s development, while adapting to market pressures, it always aimed to stick true to its core values in order to remain a technological bedrock for the future of humanity.

Topics covered in this episode:

• The vision for ETH Prague
• Takeaways from main sessions
• High-level overview of ETH Prague
• The resurgence of Polkadot
• European crypto summer events
• The general state of the Ethereum ecosystem
• Celo’s transition to L2
• L2 liquidity fragmentation
• Choosing the right L2 to build
• Improving hackathons
• Lightning round
• Final words

Episode links:

• Austin Griffith on X
• Marek Olszewski on X
• Brenda Loya on X
• Joseph Schweitzer on X
• BuidlGuidl DAO on X
• Celo on X
• Tellor on X

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
• Chorus One: one of the largest node operators worldwide, trusted by 175,000+ accounts across more than 60 networks, Chorus One combines institutional-grade security with the highest yields at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.

We couldn’t miss the Avalanche Summit where we sat down with Emin Gün Sirer, co-founder & CEO of Ava Labs, to discuss the evolution of Avalanche’s ecosystem and how HyperSDK ushers in a scalable, interoperable, multi-chain future. Join us for a fascinating discussion on Avalanche’s approach to decentralisation, scalability & interoperability, and learn why real-world applicability relies heavily on bespoke blockchain solutions.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Gün x Epicenter bromance
• How the Avalanche ecosystem & community evolved
• The future vision for Avalanche
• Scaling Avalanche and the HyperSDK
• Interoperability and the multi-chain future
• Decentralising Avalanche L1s
• Use cases and institutional adoption
• On-chain privacy
• AvaCloud
• The impact of AI in crypto
• Gün’s focus in the near future

Episode links:

• Emin Gun Sirer on X
• Avalanche on X
• Ava Labs on X

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
• Chorus One: one of the largest node operators worldwide, trusted by 175,000+ accounts across more than 60 networks, Chorus One combines institutional-grade security with the highest yields at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.

Blockchain architecture is constantly being forced to adapt to new technologies, as well as to meet new demands from users and builders. While the idea of apps building their own chains was first explored by Cosmos, it lacked the support and tooling to see it succeed. Later on, rollups also took the centerstage of Ethereum’s scaling roadmap, but due to their general purpose design, it led to a cannibalistic ecosystem. Initia learned from these 2 models and combined the best of both worlds: it built a full-stack framework for a seamless DevEx from the get-go and, more importantly, it designed its tokenomics in order to ensure maximum incentive alignment for its appchains. While the former decision removed the need for each separate chain to reinvent the wheel and risk ending up ‘a jack of all trades, master of none’, the latter ensured that appchains would not extract value away from the L1.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Ezaan’s background
• From building on Terra to Initia
• How Initia is rewriting the appchain thesis
• Initia’s enshrined liquidity & vested interest program (VIP)
• Metrics & Initia’s bet on crypto innovation
• Solving liquidity fragmentation
• Delphi’s involvement in Initia
• Future roadmap

Episode links:

• Ezaan Mangalji on X
• Jose Maria Macedo on X
• Anil Lulla on X
• Initia on X
• Delphi Digital on X
• Delphi report on Initia

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
• Chorus One: one of the largest node operators worldwide, trusted by 175,000+ accounts across more than 60 networks, Chorus One combines institutional-grade security with the highest yields at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.

As society evolves, so do its values and principles, but is that desirable for technology that seeks to build the most reliable, trustless and censorship resistant global settlement layer? Ever since the rise in popularity of Solana with its inflow of retail capital in a memecoin gold rush, Ethereum became even more criticized for sticking true to its core values despite the completely divergent demands of market participants. Moreover, the rollup centric scaling roadmap seemed to further silo attention and cause liquidity fragmentation, driving away value from Ethereum mainnet. As institutional demand is expected to grow with the introduction of staking ETFs, a new executive leadership took charge of Ethereum foundation to help steer the protocol’s narrative at the intersection between community demands and Ethereum’s ethos.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Hsiao-Wei’s & Tomasz’ backgrounds
• How they became co-executive directors of Ethereum Foundation
• Ethereum Foundation’s role moving forward
• Decision making in Ethereum Foundation
• Shaping Ethereum’s narrative
• The layer 2 landscape
• Scaling Ethereum as the global settlement layer
• Sharding
• Rollup scalability & their trade-offs
• What values drive adoption
• L2 interoperability
• Future goals

Episode links:

• Hsiao-Wei Wang on X
• Tomasz Stanczak on X
• Ethereum Foundation on X
• Ethereum on X

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
• Chorus One: one of the largest node operators worldwide, trusted by 175,000+ accounts across more than 60 networks, Chorus One combines institutional-grade security with the highest yields at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.

Taiko is a decentralized, Ethereum-equivalent (type I) rollup scaling solution which uses ZK technology. Taiko's goal is to scale Ethereum efficiently while maintaining security and decentralization. Being a type I zkEVM, Taiko retains full Ethereum equivalence, which creates a seamless DevEx, although this comes at the expense of UX as slower proof generation is the main trade-off. Moreover, in order to stay true to its decentralised ethos, Taiko operates as a based rollup, meaning that transaction sequencing is performed by L1 validators.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Joaquin’s background
• Loopring and Taiko’s beginnings
• The 4 types of zkEVMs
• Taiko's zk circuits vs. Polygon’s
• Based sequencing
• Data availability and blob commitment
• Ethereum’s role in the future
• The L2 landscape and its compromises
• Sequencer security model
• Dealing with MEV
• Based preconfirmations & Taiko ecosystem UX

Episode links:

• Joaquin Mendes on X
• Taiko on X
• Loopring on X

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
• Chorus One: one of the largest node operators worldwide, trusted by 175,000+ accounts across more than 60 networks, Chorus One combines institutional-grade security with the highest yields at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.

Founded by former Meta Diem team members, Sui is a high-performance, layer-1 blockchain designed for horizontal scaling and low-latency transactions. It uses an object-centric data model and the Move programming language to enable transaction parallelization which can handle >200,000 txs/s. Sui’s goal is to combine the benefits of blockchains with Web2’s security & frictionless UX. From account abstraction & ZKLogin, to on-chain storage & data availability solutions like Walrus, Sui rebuilds the Google/AWS stack, fully on-chain and composable.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Adeniyi’s background, from Libra to Sui
• Sui’s long-term vision
• The tech stack of Sui & its primitives
• ZKLogin & account abstraction
• Object-based approach
• Transaction processing & parallelization
• DevEx on Move vs. EVM vs. SVM
• Consensus & scalability
• MEV
• Gaming & SuiPlay
• DeFi on Sui
• Walrus data storage
• Nautilus
• Future roadmap

Episode links:

• Adeniyi Abiodun on X
• Mysten Labs on X
• Sui on X
• Walrus on X

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
• Chorus One: one of the largest node operators worldwide, trusted by 175,000+ accounts across more than 60 networks, Chorus One combines institutional-grade security with the highest yields at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.

With an extensive experience in traditional money markets, Maple Finance was envisioned as an institutional capital marketplace which combines the transparency & capital efficiency of blockchains with the regulatory framework of TradFi. Unlike many DeFi protocols that require over-collateralized loans (e.g. Aave), Maple also specializes in under-collateralized lending, enabling greater capital efficiency for institutional borrowers. With over $6b in loans since its inception, Maple plans to further expand its offerings by including RWAs as collateral assets.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Sid’s background
• The vision behind Maple Finance
• Maple’s tech stack
• Deciding risk profiles
• Over-collateralized vs. under-collateralized loans
• Assets accepted as collateral
• Deploying to other blockchains
• Institutional appeal
• Managing defaults
• RWA
• Converging DeFi & TradFi
• Biggest challenges
• Exciting upcoming trends
• Future roadmap
• Crypto correlation or decoupling?

Episode links:

• Sid Powell on X
• Maple Finance on X

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
• Chorus One: one of the largest node operators worldwide, trusted by 175,000+ accounts across more than 60 networks, Chorus One combines institutional-grade security with the highest yields at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.