FINNOVATORS

Discover how money is being embedded in infrastructure and how the developer world and DeFi are coming together as two strings of DNA. Solving for the capital inefficiency of Proof-of-Stake protocols, enhancing the performance of blockchains, diversifying infrastructure away from the large Web2.0 cloud providers, it's all in a day's work at Ankr. Interoperability and Infrastructure as a Service will be big themes in 2022 and Josh is an engaging subject matter expert. Make sure to tune in !

Dave Nadig is Chief Investment Officer & Director of Research for @ETFTrends and @ETFdb and a well-known markets commentator. In this episode we discuss his recent article: "The MetaVerse: Brave New World or Capitalist Hellscape?" We discuss Axie Infinity and his skepticism of play-to-earn (p2e) games, the lack of interoperability and standards, Eth as the currency of the MetaVerse, tokenization being the future of investment management, Bitcoin ETFs and Canada... Dave's insights are not to be missed for anyone interested in the future of the internet! 

F.A. Hayek: "The great trouble is that money wasn’t allowed to develop. After two or three hundred years of the use of coins, governments stopped any further developments. We were not allowed to experiment on it, so money hasn’t been improved, it has rather become worse in the course of time." Hard to disagree with the words of the famous late professor. Now,  building on the Bitcoin and DeFi revolutions, several initiatives are under way challenging the way we think about money.  Evan Kuo is a co-founder of Ampleforth, and explains the use cases of  a decentralized synthetic commodity money with supply elasticity as a price stabilization mechanism. We discuss decentralization, various stablecoin concepts, regulation, oracle risk and more. Make sure to tune in and subscribe!

Ilya explains how VC firm Sanctor Capital sees common investment themes in a metaverse of interdependent worlds with their own economies, and with the need to connect to each other. DeFi, GameFi and NFTs all need more infrastructure and innovation in interoperability, decentralized identity, privacy and regulatory compliance. Furthermore, we discuss how blockchain is acting as a bridge for people with different backgrounds from all over the world to come together and contribute to the ecosystem.

Entrepreneur Bill Ottman shows how to create a social network that is open-source and transparent and connects into DeFi for rewarding creators and providing an alternative advertising model. Directly challenging Big Tech, with  a clear alternative, rather than empty political grandstanding. The question is which of the the large platforms will follow first. The benefits are clear, as Bitcoin and Ethereum have shown: let others build on your platform,  let users regain control of their identity and gain their trust, scale endlessly. Freedom of expression, freedom of managing your finances and privacy are big topics and Bill is rightly passionate about them, so make sure to tune in!

Public network infrastructure provisioning has been a core business model of telcos for decades. Andreas explains the logic behind moving from telephone masts,  optic cables and data centers to operating Web3.0 nodes, validation and staking services. Tune in to hear us discuss how the future is decentralized,  investing in Celo and DeFi use cases, Self-Sovereign Identity, Berlin as the blockchain capital of the world, and how blockchain helped federal agencies manage immigration of Syrian refugees.

Is Maximal (miner) Extractable Value - MEV - a threat or an opportunity? Caleb is co-founder of Eden Network, a transaction priority network of Ethereum block producers and DeFi participants. He discusses the dark forest, sandwich bots & time bandits, the many forms of MEV, how you can both protect yourself from frontrunning and slippage, and actually turn MEV into an opportunity as Trader Extractable Value. The topics discussed on this episode are a must-know for anyone transacting on DeFi in a significant way, especially if doing so with client funds. 

Francisco Maroto set up and leads the Blockchain & Digital Assets division at BBVA, the global bank with Spanish headquarters that was an early adopter of blockchain technologies. He explains his 3E strategy:  Execution, Expertise, Ecosystem. From payments to crypto trading & custody,  securities tokenization & CBDC, stablecoins & DeFi, he elaborates on how a 160 year old bank can be innovative and a fierce competitor in the future of finance. 

Mike Cagney founded Figure in 2018 and launched the Provenance blockchain to become the ubiquitous platform for real financial services, including lending and mortgage origination, payments, and the exchange of securities and non-securities.  We discuss how Figure facilitates and de-risks the entry of financial institutions into the world of natively digital assets, how the merger with Homebridge and several recent partnership announcements fit its vision, digital identity, stablecoins, and how Provenance will become more valuable and bigger than Ethereum. 

Dan Doney first discovered blockchain while working in the US intelligence community, where he became the first Chief Innovation Officer. He founded Securrency in 2015 and raised over $60m to date to transform global financial markets. In this episode, we discuss institutional defi, self-processing financial instruments, the ontology of finance, some of his favorite people and  projects in the space and what winning looks like for Securrency.