Fortune Teller Podcast

Today we’re talking to Xochitl Cazador, Head of Ecosystem Growth at Celo Labs. Xochitl considers her background unique, as she came from a small town in Mexico with no running water and no electricity. Coming from a town of 200, she was the first in her family to go to college. From there, she became an executive for a Fortune 500 company. This is where she noticed there was plenty of wealth but a lack of opportunity in a lot of cities outside of Silicon Valley. She says when she discovered blockchain, she got goosebumps. She was excited about democratizing wealth and technology. This prompted her to leave her job at Cisco and go to Stanford Business School to try to find a way to bridge the gap.

Xochitl would go on to become the Head of Ecosystem at Celo Labs, a mobile first blockchain company. Their mission is to build an open financial system that creates prosperity for all. She says when you look at penetration rates for smartphone users, you see that it’s increasing at a rapid pace. When you compare that to adoption of financial systems and tools, that still lags. Celo is uniquely positioned by being a mobile first app to bridge that gap. When it comes to use cases that will get to real world adoption, Xochitl says applications where you can store, send, and save money are at the top of the list.

The decentralized aspect of it has helped their presence go from 87 countries to 113. What excites Xochitl most about crypto is the possibility for communities to leapfrog. It’s about taking a non-traditional path and doing something that allows you to surpass and advance in unimaginable ways. It’s amazing how emerging countries are using crypto. From a first world view, there are two roads to take; end users coming into DeFi, and how to take technology today and empower traditional FinTech. Xochitl says supporting entrepreneurs is key. She recommends any and all entrepreneurs to check out and apply at Celo Camp. The Celo Camp inspiration was how to provide mentorships and access to capital to entrepreneurs. Before, the basic route was to go to Silicon Valley and fundraise. Now we’re seeing the capital dispersed, as well as the support that goes with it.

To learn more, visit Celo Labs at www.celo.org.

--

The Fortune Teller podcast is a discussion between industry leaders in blockchain and financial technologies. The podcast focuses on the development of blockchain-based financial services and outlines the current state of the industry and future predictions for the adoption of decentralized finance. Go to www.teller.finance/

Today we’re talking to Jake Brukhman, founder and CEO of CoinFund. Jake has always been a computer science and math guy, with a 10-year career in financial technology. He says he learned about bitcoin in 2011 and while he thought it was fascinating, it took him a couple of years to really understand what blockchains were. It was after reading a white paper on Ethereum that he realized it made a lot of sense to make a new digital asset class. This led him to found CoinFund in 2015 which was the first investment and research firm in the industry. CoinFund has studied and supported development of blockchain since its inception and the team has more than 30 years of experience in investing, engineering, and law. The evolution has been about how this technology can be applied to all of these different areas. Jake says blockchain is a coordination technology that’s as broadly applicable as a database. He believes blockchain technology can play a role in so many different areas with some core ones being transfer of money, accumulation of value and digital goods, Web3, and decentralized financial protocols.

--

The Fortune Teller podcast is a discussion between industry leaders in blockchain and financial technologies. The podcast focuses on the development of blockchain-based financial services and outlines the current state of the industry and future predictions for the adoption of decentralized finance. Go to www.teller.finance/

Today we’re talking with Humpty Calderon, Head of Community at Ontology, a blockchain for self-sovereign ID and data. They specialize in things like decentralized data exchange, credit based cross chain lending, and more. Before joining Ontology Humpty was introduced to the world of DeFi through bitcoin in 2015. He started digging into conversations, joined several local meet ups, and discovered builders through those meetups. As these builders started looking into proof of stake they decided they wanted to release a community node on Tron. As they started developing the technology, they invited Humpty to join them and help build their community. After live elections, their node was the first community run node that was selected, and they had over 50% of the delegated stake. Once things were up and running, Humpty developed a digital wallet and the node went onto the Ontology platform This is when Humpty met the team and kept in touch over the years. In early 2021 Ontology started talking to Humpty about an interest in further developing their technology, and they extended an invitation for Humpty to join the team.

--

The Fortune Teller podcast is a discussion between industry leaders in blockchain and financial technologies. The podcast focuses on the development of blockchain-based financial services and outlines the current state of the industry and future predictions for the adoption of decentralized finance. Go to www.teller.finance/

Today we’re talking with Alan Chiu, co-founder and CEO of Enya which recently launched a L2. Alan says when crypto started taking off last year Enya was still helping to fight Covid. They had developed a distributed crypto symptom tracker that was used by 13 million people. This is when Alan started to see the potential of what he had learned in the cryptography space. By starting Enya he hoped to restore the balance of power between individuals and centralized entities. The imbalance of power has some to do with who owns the data. Centralized entities own a lot of personal data and Alan says that’s a function of the way we’ve structured the information architecture over time. Service providers and companies had to accumulate a lot of data in order to provide a great level of service to individual users. But what if we could use advanced cryptography to restore the balance of power where users' data could stay on their devices.

--

The Fortune Teller podcast is a discussion between industry leaders in blockchain and financial technologies. The podcast focuses on the development of blockchain-based financial services and outlines the current state of the industry and future predictions for the adoption of decentralized finance. Go to www.teller.finance/

Today we’re talking with Joe Lallouz, co-founder and CEO of Bison Trails. Joe says his journey into crypto was long but pretty organic. As an engineer, Joe is a very technical person, and it was the technology perspective of crypto that caught his interest early on. He had friends that were more involved in the bitcoin side of things, and they showed him how it worked. The idea of programmable money and digital assets was exciting to Joe, so he started messing around with that. In 2016 he decided he wanted to go full time into crypto and got to work as a builder. He and a friend were working on two different projects, one being a wallet, when they realized that the ecosystem around supporting developers wasn’t great. Joe says there wasn’t a lot of tooling available to builders. That’s when he had an aha moment and realized he could help to make it easier for people to participate. So he took a step back and decided to build a platform to make it easier to build on chains. By the end of 2017 Bison Trails was born.

--

The Fortune Teller podcast is a discussion between industry leaders in blockchain and financial technologies. The podcast focuses on the development of blockchain-based financial services and outlines the current state of the industry and future predictions for the adoption of decentralized finance. Go to www.teller.finance/

Today we’re speaking with Anastasiya Belyaeva, one of the co-founders of Fabric Ventures. Anastasiya has always had a vision of the world where things work differently and where individuals are free to organize in ways that they like, to set up goals and accomplish them without needing to ask permission to participate in the economy. After graduating from university Anastasiya joined a venture capital fund. After working for a couple of VC funds and investing in software in general, she got together with her soon-to-be partner to build Fabric Ventures.

--

The Fortune Teller podcast is a discussion between industry leaders in blockchain and financial technologies. The podcast focuses on the development of blockchain-based financial services and outlines the current state of the industry and future predictions for the adoption of decentralized finance. Go to www.teller.finance/

Today we’re talking to Sid Powell, the co-founder and CEO of Maple Finance, an institutional marketplace for capital built on the Ethereum blockchain. Sid has a traditional finance background, where he worked in banking and mortgage and asset backed securities. He says he was always more fascinated by what it would take to build a business, so he joined a FinTech and ran the treasury department. It was at that time that he started learning more about Ethereum. Sid says he started thinking about ways to manage debt and help businesses expand by using smart contracts. That was the idea that became Maple.

Coming from banking, Sid had been exposed to the start-up scene, but he never saw huge financial innovation until blockchain. As he learned more, he could see a clear opportunity to have an impact on the financial system. He says what can start small in the defy space has potential to turn into huge protocols or companies. That’s one of the things that attracted him to the space. Sid says he could see that this was the internet of finance, so he knew there was going to be tremendous opportunity. Sid says he knew he would regret it if he hadn’t taken the plunge.

Sid believes that success largely depends on the effort and effectiveness with which you approach your tasks. He says it’s amazing how much resilience is a core competency you need to have in this business. He’s described it before as chewing glass and staring into the abyss. When asked what books have inspired him lately, Sid says the book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. It’s a brief history of humankind that Sid says has highlighted the importance of focusing on the story you're telling your team, community, and customers. The book has also brought to his attention that most institutions, other than religion, are less than 300-400 years old. The Federal Reserve for example is only 107 years old. It’ll be interesting to see where the future takes us.

When asked what he could confidently predict would happen by the end of the year, Sid said he thinks we’ll see over a billion dollars in under-collateralized loans done. To put that in perspective, across all protocols, there were maybe 10-15 million on chain in defy in under-collateralized loans at the beginning of 2021. This would be 100x growth.

--

The Fortune Teller podcast is a discussion between industry leaders in blockchain and financial technologies. The podcast focuses on the development of blockchain-based financial services and outlines the current state of the industry and future predictions for the adoption of decentralized finance. Go to www.teller.finance/

Today we’re talking with Regan Bozman, co-founder of Lattice Capital, an early stage crypto venture fund. Regan says they invest in tokens, equity, NFTs, DeFi, and the like. Four and a half years ago, Regan was working at AngelList when he and some others spun out CoinList. Regan was the first employee to jump over, and he spent three and a half years doing coin sales. Now they’re just getting Lattice off the ground and are excited to invest in and work with early stage teams.

Regan says right now this space is all about adoption. When he first joined CoinList their focus was on everything no one else wanted to do, from writing token sales to handling customer support. At the time no one was doing sales, so when Regan joined there was a backlog of a thousand companies that were inquiring. Regan says it was a trial by fire entry. As they built up the company, they hired someone else to do sales. Regan then started spending more time with customers, finding out what they wanted to achieve with their launches.

When Regan started in crypto, he knew nothing about it. He says he had an insane inbox with ideas like launching a hotel in space. Everyone thought there was a quick buck to be made. Regan says it was low barriers to entry that brought him back around in 2019. He remembers that at the time there were two young guys in India that launched a hack-a-thon and within 30 days had $20-30 million running through smart contracts. Regan says that was eye-opening for him because there was no way in the traditional finance system that anyone without a lot of money and at least two years time could build an application like that. Regan realized that they could create a much more competitive market.

In the short term, Regan says the market is skewed. Ultimately, crypto has a history of booms and busts. The last 12-18 months of defy hype has made it not that hard to raise money, launch a token, and make some cash. Regan says they’re long term, they don’t flip tokens. He says what they’re really excited about is fascinating applications of smart contracts. He says they’ve made one investment in Latin America, which is like leveraging stable coin rails for remittance, that’s doing very well.

--

The Fortune Teller podcast is a discussion between industry leaders in blockchain and financial technologies. The podcast focuses on the development of blockchain-based financial services and outlines the current state of the industry and future predictions for the adoption of decentralized finance. Go to www.teller.finance/

The Fortune Teller podcast is a discussion between industry leaders in blockchain and financial technologies. The podcast focuses on the development of blockchain-based financial services and outlines the current state of the industry and future predictions for the adoption of decentralized finance.

Hosted by the CEO Ryan, please reach out to [email protected] with any questions.