Zubair Quraishi talks about recent news events with Jeff Hancock of CoinPass. Jeff is a former security expert so he really knows his stuff. They talk about the fallout from the Celcius, 3AC, and Voyager bankruptcies, and where the Yield comes from with a lot of these black box crypto companies.  

They also discuss what you need to learn in crypto in order to be a good trader, from understanding crypto transactions to using MetaMask.  

They also talk about the Ethereum Merge and the 5 stages: “The Merge,” “The Surge,” “The Verge,” “The Purge,” and, “The Splurge”  

Lastly, they discuss Fireblocks and the role of stablecoins and whether there is a need for a GBP stable coin. Enjoy the episode!

Show timeline:  

00:00 Introduction by Zubair to Jeff Hancock of CoinPass  

03:00 We discuss the fallout from the Celsius, Voyager, and 3AC Crypto bankruptcies - Jeff talks about how there could be more bad news to come, and how the crypto industry has a bad image in 2022. We discuss about how these companies are examples of black box companies which means that they are not transparent. We talk about how these companies lend money to each other and how the crypto markets really work internally. We go further into what need to know to trade crypto such as knowledge of how transactions, block explorers and Metamask.  

13:12 We discuss NFTs and cross chain solutions. When your taxi drivers tells you to buy bitcoin, or your plumber launches an NFT collection maybe it is time to get out of the NFT market! Use cases for NFTs like ticketing like holding up a mobile phone to get access to a physical location may make sense. Access via NFTs and mobile phone to Crypto club in London is one such club. NFT tickets will also be used in football and sports tickets as they are harder to fake.  

24:21 Ethereum Merge and the 5 stages: “The Merge,” “The Surge,” “The Verge,” “The Purge,” and, “The Splurge”  . The background is that Eth was the first smart contract platform and tries to stay backward compatible. Eth is overloaded and expensive, and progress has been slow which has allowed faster and cheaper Eth compatible chains like Fantom, Polygon to get market share. Also it has allowed non eth compatible chains like Solana to gain traction. Could existing Eth miners move to bitcoin. How we think about layer 2s will change, as it will be important to have assets that work across multiple chains , without the hacks occurring on bridges  

29:40 The future of Web3/Defi and big tech chains like Google Chain, Microsoft Chain, and where the crypto nodes actually live today, on big tech cloud provider chains. How Metamask is a big single point of failure, and we need to move permission based systems. How Government ID shops may come about, much like mobile phone shops of today. It could be the post office which performs government functions like driving licenses in UK today, and has taken over post office duties too. How restoring access to crypto wallets is an unsolved problem in crypto. But offline restoration is still not very secure.   37:02 Uniswap and institutional pools for the enterprise. Centralised and non decentralised options will both be available  

39:18 A discussion about what is Fireblocks, it has become a standard system for trading crypto for teams. They have many enterprise features for policies and security.  

41:15 Using crytp to move from quarterley financial staements to real time financial views. This has many advantages for financial reporting  

42:50 Discussing stablecoins and the need for a GBP based stablecoin, mainly because USD via USDC and USDC is used as a standard currency even in the UK. Also how the USD is getting stronger, instead of becoming worth less as many people feared would happen.