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

In this day and age, privacy and confidentiality are more important than ever. Advancements in the cryptographic research of zero knowledge proofs (ZKPs), fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) and multi-party computation (MPC) paved the way for computational integrity and confidential computing. While FHE allows for computation to be performed on encrypted data without the need for prior decryption, it is MPC that enables compliance with regulations (e.g. AML). Arcium aims to build a global super computer for parallelised confidential computing, powered by custom MXEs (multi-party computation execution environments).

Topics covered in this episode:

• Yannik’s background
• Confidentiality & decentralised compliance
• Confidential computing
• TEEs (trusted execution environments) & side-channel attacks
• ZKP vs. MPC vs. FHE
• Arcium’s global super computer architecture
• How Arcium differentiates itself from other privacy protocols
• Use cases
• Censorship risks
• Ecosystem development

Episode links:

• Yannik Schrade on Twitter
• Arcium on Twitter

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: Chorus One is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Felix Lutsch.

The future is multi-chain, scalable and modular. However, while Cosmos’ IBC set the standard for interoperability, Ethereum’s L2 shift revealed a huge problem of liquidity fragmentation across the many rollups fighting for market share. Polymer aims to bridge the two ecosystems and bring the best of both worlds: Ethereum’s native liquidity and Cosmos’ interoperability, through a modular framework using the OP-stack and IBC.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Bo’s background and the evolution of Polymer
• Scaling limits of L1s vs. L2s
• The ‘endgame’ for rollup frameworks
• IBC
• Interoperability & network topology: 70’s/80’s vs. blockchains
• Polymer hub
• Monomer framework
• Pre-confirmation & finality trade-offs
• Cross-rollup interoperability
• Building appchains with Monomer
• Modularity

Episode links:

• Bo Du on Twitter
• Polymer Labs on Twitter

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: Chorus One is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture.

Self-custodial wallets often represent the first point of contact for crypto users that venture away from centralised exchanges. As a result, their security and user experience should be paramount. This often explained Metamask’s first mover advantage and the users’ reluctance to change. However, as infrastructure evolves, new wallets are equipped from the get-go with features that are designed for normie adoption, such as: account abstraction, gas fee abstraction, easier on- and off-ramp, etc. Zeal was envisioned as a day-to-day wallet solution, allowing users true freedom to transact, both on-chain, as well as off-chain (i.e. real world spendings).

Topics covered in this episode:

• Hannes’ background
• Existing wallet solutions and Zeal’s userbase
• Wallet UX, account abstraction and passkeys
• Security assumptions and passkey recovery
• Smart contract interactions
• Zeal’s mobile-first focus
• IBAN & Gnosis Pay integrations
• Capturing market share
• Banking the unbanked
• Gas fees
• Cross-chain interoperability
• DeFi & staking
• Monetisation
• Privacy
• Zeal’s backend
• Growth & business scaling in Web3
• Zealot recruitment

Episode links:

• Hannes Graah on Twitter
• Hannes Graah on LinkedIn
• Zeal on Twitter

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: Chorus One is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.

As the crypto industry matures, more sophisticated market participants become involved. As a result, risk management and hedging will evolve to levels seen in TradFi. However, regardless of the preferred market activity, when interacting with a blockchain, every actor competes for the same limited blockspace. Based on demand levels, the cost for securing that blockspace can fluctuate (in the form of miner fees for Bitcoin transactions, or gas fees for PoS blockchains). Therefore, a particular niche of power users could lower these costs by reserving blockspace in advance of elevated demand levels. Alkimiya set out to build just that - a marketplace for blockspace.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Leo’s background
• The vision behind Alkimia
• Market participants for blockspace
• Hedging costs
• Use cases on Ethereum
• Proposer-Builder Separation and preconfirmations
• Reserving blockspace
• Polkadot’s blockspace allocation
• Current market sentiment. ETH vs. SOL

Episode links:

• Leo Zhang on Twitter
• Alkimiya on Twitter

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: Chorus One is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.

The saying goes that knowledge is power, and this perfectly applies to blockchains due to their innate transparency and immutability. However, raw data could seem, at first, unusable. This is where analytics companies, such as Nansen, play a major role in demystifying blockchain data by labelling it. In turn, curated data holds value as it can give an edge to traders, by tracking ‘smart money’ wallets. In the age of AI, most of the heavy lifting of data analysis is performed by LLMs, but human input is equally valuable for discerning nuances and fine tuning the process.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Alex’s background, from AI to crypto
• Nansen’s values
• Querying blockchain data
• Supported chains
• Ensuring data accuracy
• Generating wallet labels
• The role of LLMs and AI
• Data privacy and monetisation
• On-chain transparency, privacy and ethics
• Roadmap and further enhancements

Episode links:

• Alex Svanevik on Twitter
• Nansen on Twitter

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: Chorus One is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.

P.S.: Our friends from @nansen_ai have offered us 10 discount codes for 10% off on their professional and pioneer plans! If you are interested in unlocking Nansen's true power, DM us on Twitter (X - @epicenterbtc) and we'll hook you up with a code (FCFS).

In 2017, Vitalik Buterin defined the ‘Scalability Trilemma’ which consisted of 3 attributes that every blockchain had to balance depending on its intended use cases: decentralisation, scalability and security. While Ethereum sacrificed scalability in favour of security and decentralisation, others prioritised throughput over the other two. However, a solution was proposed, inspired from Web2 computer science - sharding. Despite the fact that Ethereum’s ossification and significant progress in zero knowledge research led to a shift in Ethereum’s roadmap away from execution sharding towards L2 rollups, there were other L1s that were designed from the get-go as sharded blockchains. One such example was Elrond, who implemented the beacon chain PoS consensus alongside a sharded execution layer. Their recent rebranding to MultiversX alludes to a multi-chain, interoperable ecosystem, in which sovereign chains can communicate in a similar manner to cross-shard transaction routing.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Lucian’s background and founding Elrond (MultiversX)
• Elrond’s validator & shard architecture
• Cross-shard composability
• VMs, smart contracts and transaction routing
• Self sovereignty and modularity
• MultiversX vision
• Roadmap

Episode links:

• Lucian Mincu on Twitter
• MultiversX on Twitter
• xPortal on Twitter

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: Chorus One is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Felix Lutsch.

Web3’s decentralisation is currently limited to smart contracts as they can be verified on-chain. However, until scalability and UX become on par with that of Web2, the only realistic way for crypto to reach mass adoption is threw off-chain dApps. This creates the premise for a security bottleneck in the form of centralised APIs used for on-chain querying. Mel Project aims to expand on-chain security and decentralisation (consensus) to off-chain apps, basically achieving off-chain composability through trustless light clients. Earendil, the backbone of their ecosystem, designed to resist ISP-level censorship, is a decentralized anonymous communication and payment network that enables autonomous applications and true P2P protocols.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Eric’s background and founding Mel Project
• Why Ethereum came short
• Is Infura a security bottleneck?
• Liberating markets (and the Internet)
• Light clients and how Mel Project tackles them
• Use cases
• Smart contracts on Mel Project
• Scaling the ‘world computer’
• Mel Project’s consensus: Streamlet
• Why Mel Project chose an UTXO model
• Earendil & ISP-level censorship resistance
• Roadmap
• The Geph VPN
• Mel Project’s low volatility (stable) coin
• $SYM: PoS token
• Misc.

Episode links:

• Eric Tung on Twitter
• Mel Project on Twitter
• Geph VPN on Twitter
• Moxie Marlinspike's 'My first impressions on web3' article
• Streamlet BFT consensus model

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: Chorus One is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.

One of the OG flag bearers for decentralisation, Gnosis initially set out to build a prediction market on Ethereum. However, unlike the vibrant ecosystem of today, the early Ethereum days were barren. As a result, Gnosis team decided to build out their own infrastructure and tooling to suit their needs. Before long, tools such as Gnosis Safe, Zodiac, etc. were quickly adopted by the entire industry. Nowadays, since the foundation has been tried and tested, Gnosis 3.0 aims to focus on improving consumer dApp UX in order to facilitate widespread adoption.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Gnosis’ background and vision
• Gnosis 3.0
• Gnosis DAO
• Capital allocation management
• How Gnosis Pay revolutionizes payment rails
• The ‘Baguette Conundrum’: privacy & regulatory compliance for on-chain payments
• The future of the EVM vs. modularity
• Would Gnosis shift to an L2 architecture?

Episode links:

• Friederike Ernst on Twitter
• Gnosis DAO on Twitter
• Gnosis Chain on Twitter
• Gnosis Pay on Twitter
• Safe on Twitter
• CoW Swap on Twitter

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: Chorus One is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture.

We couldn’t miss EthCC 7, nor the chance to chat with Vitalik Buterin about Ethereum’s status quo as an L1 amidst the plethora of L2s competing for market share, and what challenges will most likely arise along the way (e.g. staking decentralisation).

Tune in for a captivating discussion on the importance of decentralisation as a last stand of human empowerment in the current geopolitical context and how it could positively impact AI's trajectory. 

Topics covered in this episode:

• Types of Ethereum ‘hardnesses’ (sic)
• The L1 status quo
• Staking decentralisation & block building
• Non-financial crypto applications
• Account abstraction & interoperability
• Solana & Bitcoin ecosystems
• DeSci, biotech & longevity
• Geopolitics
• Ethereum nation state?
• The impact of AI
• Do not go gentle into that good night

Episode links:

• Vitalik Buterin on Twitter
• EthCC on Twitter
• Ethereum on Twitter

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: Chorus One is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.one

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

One of the bluechip DeFi projects and backbone of Ethereum liquidity markets, Aave has recently announced their V4 upgrade proposal, which aims (among others) to unify crosschain liquidity.

We were joined by Stani Kulechov, founder & CEO of Aave, to discuss the DeFi (r)evolution since ETH Lend to Aave V4, expanding to non-EVM chains and potentially even building a self-sovereign chain. 

Topics covered in this episode:

• The evolution of Aave
• Aave V3 risk management & MakerDAO feud
• Aave V4
• Unified liquidity layer & risk pricing
• GHO stablecoin
• How the unified liquidity layer improves UX
• RWA & liquidation strategies in Aave V4
• Expanding to non-EVM networks
• Building a self-sovereign chain
• Aave’s role in the future of DeFi
• How stablecoins will evolve
• DeFi institutional adoption
• Future roadmap

Episode links:

• Stani Kulechov on Twitter
• Aave on Twitter
• Lens Protocol on Twitter

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: Chorus One is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst.