Messari's Unqualified Opinions

By Blockworks

What's Messari's Unqualified Opinions about?

Unqualified Opinions is a daily podcast hosted by Messari’s CEO Ryan Selkis featuring candid, fast-paced interviews with crypto’s top builders and investors.

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Messari's Unqualified Opinions episodes:

06.30.2020
India's Burgeoning Crypto Scene with WazirX CEO Nischal Shetty
Nischal clears up misconceptions about India's regulatory landscape and shares what he's seeing that has him excited about the future of crypto in India. --- Special thanks to our sponsors: Lukka - Crypto taxes made simple. Use the promo code "MESSARITAX" and get...
06.25.2020
Ledger CEO Pascal Gauthier on the Business of Being Your Own Bank
Ledger CEO Pascal Gauthier joins The Unqualified Opinions podcast to discuss self custody, and the user experience of being your own bank. --- Special thanks to our sponsors: Lukka - Crypto taxes made simple. Use the promo code "MESSARITAX" and get $5 off...
06.17.2020
Charles Hoskinson on Cardano & Network Effects
With the next major phase of Cardano's mainnet (Shelley) fast approaching, IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson provides a full project update as well his thoughts on the competitive outlook of the smart contracting landscape. --- Special thanks to our sponsors: Lukka - Crypto taxes...
05.27.2020
Skale Labs CEO Jack O'Holleran on Launch & Decentralization
Skale is a middle-ware protocol that aims to allow dApps to run on a high-speed consensus layer above platforms like Ethereum and EOS. With Skale approaching its mainnet launch this summer, Ryan and Skale co-founder/CEO Jack O’Holleran discuss the project’s...
05.21.2020
Insuring DeFi with Nexus Mutual Founder Hugh Karp
Nexus Mutual is an insurance protocol for DeFi that covers financial loss resulting from hacks and unintended code usage. Nexus paid out its first claim following one of the bZx hacks early this year. In this conversation, founder Hugh Karp...
05.19.2020
Tokensoft CEO Mason Borda on Security Token Hurdles & Pathways to Growth
Security tokens have at times, been heralded as the next major phase of crypto adoption. Despite the surrounding hype, security tokens don’t have any actual trading volume to speak of. In this conversation, Tokensoft CEO Mason Borda discusses the hurdles...
05.18.2020
Halving 2020: The Bitcoin Reformation with Tuur Demeester
Tuur Demeester is one of Bitcoin’s longest standing research analysts who’s been through all three halvings. In this conversation, he recalls how his study of financial history and subsequent worry about our financial system’s inflationary risks led him to a...
05.15.2020
Halving 2020: Bitcoin Then & Now with Charlie Shrem
It doesn’t get much more OG than Charlie Shrem. Charlie’s been involved in bitcoin from the days where the community consisted of a couple hundred people on forum.bitcoin.org, created by Satoshi himself. In this conversion, we discuss both bitcoin and...
05.14.2020
Layer 1 CEO Alex Liegl on the Institutionalization of Mining in America
Layer 1 is focused on converting “electricity into money” via highly efficient bitcoin mining facilities. Where mining has historically been concentrated in places with cheap and sometimes subsidized energy, Layer 1’s operations are currently focused in America: West Texas to be...
05.13.2020
Halving 2020: Bobby Lee on Bitcoin in China & $100K BTC
Bobby Lee has witnessed the ascent of Bitcoin from a unique perspective relative to many in the west. In 2013, Lee was the CEO of BTCChina and dealt first hand with the CCP as they tried to come to grips...
05.12.2020
Fireblocks CEO Michael Shaulov on Institutional Adoption and Stablecoin Disruption
Fireblocks is one of the hottest infrastructure companies in crypto, facilitating $30B in digital asset transfers to date and recently expanding its presence into Asia. In this conversation, CEO Michael Shaulov details how a $200M heist from the North Korean...
05.08.2020
Bison Trails CEO Joe Lallouz on Crypto Infrastructure & Working With Libra
Bison Trails is an infrastructure-as-a-service company that allows anyone to run a node for multiple blockchains. This gives Bison Trails CEO Joe Lallouz the unique vantage point of seeing all of the major projects in the space at a granular...
05.06.2020
Halving 2020: The History of Bitcoin OTC Markets with Dan Matuszewski
Veteran OTC trader Dan Matuszewski discusses the evolution of crypto OTC markets from Bitcoin's first, second, and third halvings, and how the trading environment has gotten... a bit different from the 2012 event. --- Bitstamp is the original global cryptocurrency exchange. Since...
05.05.2020
Ontology Co-founder Li Jun on Asia’s crypto ecosystem and the smart contracting landscape
This interview with Ontology co-founder Li Jun offers a rare window into Asia’s crypto ecosystem, which remains undercovered and misunderstood in the West. In Li’s own words, Ontology is a decentralized trust collaboration platform. In our words, it’s one of...
04.30.2020
Bitfinex CTO Paolo Ardoino on Tether’s Dominance and Spotting Fake Volume
Paolo Ardoino sits at the intersection of one of crypto’s most liquid exchanges and its most dominant stablecoin. In this conversation, Paolo provides unique insight into the philosophy behind Tether and walks us through its path to a $5B+ market...
04.28.2020
ErisX CEO Thomas Chippas on Creating Regulated Crypto Markets
ErisX is one of a handful of highly regulated crypto platforms that currently offers spot and derivatives trading for top assets. In this discussion, CEO Thomas Chippas discusses their slow and steady approach to organically creating vibrant markets. He details...
04.23.2020
Midcap Doubleheader with Zcoin’s Reuben Yap and Zilliqa’s Colin JG Miles
In this double header, we dive into two midcap projects across the privacy and smart contract sectors. First we talk to Zcoin founder Reuben Yap and learn about how Zcoin is differentiated from other privacy protocols like Monero and Zcash....
04.21.2020
Celo Founder Rene Reinsberg on Stablecoins, Emerging Markets & Financial Inclusion
As long as there have been blockchains there has been talk of “banking the unbanked”. Backed by a16z and Polychain, Celo aims to deliver financial inclusion through a mix of on-chain collateralized stablecoins and easy to use mobile applications built...
04.16.2020
Chad Cascarilla on the Early Days of Crypto, Regulation and Paxos’ Long Term Ambitions
Paxos founder and CEO, Chad Cascarilla, is one of crypto’s longest standing entrepreneurs who first fell down the bitcoin rabbit hole in 2010. Paxos is the first crypto company to receive a NY Trust charter and has blazed a trail...
04.14.2020
Paxful CEO Ray Youssef on Bitcoin Usage in Africa and its Emerging Market Future
Today’s episode with Ray Youssef covers his path to founding Paxful after immigrating to New York from Egypt, founding 2 successful startups and 11 failed ones before temporarily becoming homeless while finding his way to bitcoin. He details how he...
04.09.2020
Anchorage’s Nathan McCauley on Custody, Libra, Bitcoin, XRP & crypto M&A
Backed by Visa, Andreesen Horowitz and Blockchain Capital, Anchorage has emerged as one of the largest custodians in crypto. In this conversation, Anchorage CEO Nathan McCauley details the origins of the company and their early involvement with the Libra Association...
04.07.2020
Ben Hunt on the future of money, crypto, and political power
Ben Hunt is the author of Epsilon Theory; a newsletter and website that examines markets through the lenses of history and game theory. In this wide ranging discussion, Ben discusses what our government's response to the COVID-19 crisis revealed about...
04.02.2020
The Bitcoin Custodian with BitGo CEO Mike Belshe
While BitGo may not be as much of a household name as Coinbase and Binance, they’re easily one of the industry’s most important institutional custodians. BitGo supports custody for over 200 assets and In 2019 alone, accounted for 20% of...
03.31.2020
A Blockchain Future with Overstock CEO Jonathan Johnson
Overstock is known in crypto circles as one of the first major online retailers to accept Bitcoin payments. On top of being an early adopter, Overstock has invested heavily into blockchain technology through its subsidiary, Medici Ventures. In this conversation,...
03.26.2020
Exchange the US with Binance US CEO Catherine Coley
Catherine Coley is the CEO of Binance US and former Head of XRP Institutional Liquidity at Ripple. In this conversation, Coley details her early days working for Morgan Stanley on the Forex trading floor in Hong Kong where she got...
03.24.2020
Digitizing the Dollar with Christopher Giancarlo
Christopher Giancarlo earned the moniker “Crypto Dad” by advocating for sensible crypto regulation during his time as CFTC Commissioner. He’s since joined the advisory board to the Chamber of Digital Commerce to advocate for the Digital Dollar Project. In this...
03.19.2020
Power Laws with Meltem Demirors
Meltem Demirors is the Chief Strategy Officer at Coinshares and goes way back with Ryan from their time together at Digital Currency Group. In this conversation, Ryan and Meltem discuss her pathway through the industry, the ridiculousness of 2017’s ICO...
03.17.2020
Global Public Health with Alex Gladstein
Alex Gladstein is the Chief Strategy Officer for Human Rights Foundation and a long time proponent of Bitcoin and its potential to bring freedom to those living under authoritarian regimes. In this conversation, Alex revisits some of his experiences and...
03.13.2020
Covering Crypto with Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal
The mainstream media and the crypto industry have long been at odds, with crypto proponents often accusing the media of unbalanced or inaccurate coverage. Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal has been covering financial markets since 2008 and bitcoin longer than many of...
03.10.2020
Coinbase Law with Coinbase CLO Brian Brooks
Coinbase sits atop a short list of the largest and most critically important companies in crypto - a status they’ve achieved through a mix of product innovation and legal and regulatory compliance. As Chief Legal Officer, Brian Brooks is tasked...
03.06.2020
Building Cardano with IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson
There are very few people who have created a top 20 cryptocurrency. Charles Hoskinson is one of them. In this conversation, Charles details his path through a failed project with Dan Larimer, an unsanctimonious departure from the founding team of...
03.03.2020
Bitcoin Past, Present & Future with Casa CTO Jameson Lopp
Jameson Lopp has been involved with Bitcoin in one form another for 9 of Bitcoin’s 11 year history. In that time, Lopp has contributed volumes of free educational resources while remaining a vocal proponent of Bitcoin’s core ethos of individual...
02.27.2020
Crypto-plumbing with Arwen CEO Sharon Goldberg
In 2019, centralized crypto exchanges were hacked to the collective tune of $300M. The ever present threat of exchange hacks has led to the rise of DEXs, which allow for trade without handing over custody to a third party. While...
02.25.2020
The Dudas Abides with The Block CEO Mike Dudas
Founded in 2018, The Block has grown into one of the leading crypto news outlets using a combination of thorough research and reporting and brash, in your face twitter theatrics. In this conversation, The Block Founder and CEO Mike Dudas...
02.20.2020
Virtual Private Networks with Orchid CEO Seven Waterhouse
Many in the West often look to privacy preserving technologies like Orchid’s virtual private network (VPN) marketplace as enablers of nefarious activities. Go to a place like Indonesia, where 43% of the population uses VPNs to circumvent an overly censored...
02.18.2020
The Bitcoin Institution with River Financial’s Alex Leishman
If Bitcoin is to become the foundation of a global, non-national monetary system, consumers and institutions are going to need Bitcoin based financial services. At least that’s the thesis driving River Financial: a Bitcoin only platform that borrows heavily from...
02.14.2020
Special Edition: COVID-19 with Balaji Srinivasan
You likely know Balaji as the former CTO of Coinbase and now editor-in-chief of Nakamoto.com. What you may not know is that prior to his days in the cryptosphere, Balaji studied at the intersection of engineering, biology and statistics, received...
02.13.2020
Dash’s Strategic Vision with Dash Core Group CEO Ryan Taylor
Launched as Xcoin in 2014, Dash is one of the oldest projects in the top 25. While the prevailing narrative around bitcoin has shifted to digital gold, Dash is still pursuing wide adoption as a payments network; an area that...
02.11.2020
Enterprise Blockchains & CBDCs with R3 CTO Richard Brown
Bitcoin is a technology that launched a thousand ships. In one direction, hundreds of permissionless cryptoassets and networks. In the other, permissioned networks being developed by enterprises and governments to upgrade and iterate on existing systems and institutions. R3’s Corda...
02.06.2020
Crypto’s East-West Divide with Tron Founder Justin Sun
Justin Sun is easily one of crypto’s most polarizing and controversial figures. While many in the West have been critical of Sun’s over-the-top marketing tactics, it’s hard to deny the momentum Tron has built in the East. Armed with a...
02.04.2020
The Lending Machine with Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky
Crypto lending markets have exploded over the last year. Among the players in an increasingly competitive marketplace is Celsius, which according to CEO Alex “The Machine” Mashinsky has received $450M from over 70,000 users in 174 countries and paid out...
01.30.2020
XRP - The Remittance Standard? with Bitso CEO Daniel Vogel
This is one conversation the entire #XRParmy is going to love. Daniel Vogel, CEO of Bitso, which is Mexico's largest crypto exchange details how the company is utilizing XRP the asset (not just Ripple software) to catch a piece of...
01.28.2020
Building out the DEX Frontier with Radar CEO Alan Curtis
Radar Relay, the peer-to-peer trading platform built on the 0x protocol did a respectable $100M in volume in 2019. This however is down from the dizzying highs of 2018 where in certain months, Radar Relay facilitated up to $60M. In...
01.23.2020
Stablecoins: The Big Picture with Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire
USDC, backed by Circle and Coinbase’s Centre Consortium has emerged as the dominant “regulated” stablecoin. In this conversation, Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire provides some context around the evolution of USDC as well as where he sees it fitting within the...
01.21.2020
Cosmos & Beyond with Zaki Manian
Tendermint Director of Research Zaki Manian reflects on the origins of the Cosmos project, including their 2017 crowdsale and the success of their “Game of Stakes” incentivized testnet. He also provides some color on why he thinks the Cosmos ATOM...
01.16.2020
Building a Crypto Civilization with Balaji Srinivasan
On the 11th anniversary of Bitcoin’s genesis block, former Coinbase CTO Balajis Srinivasan launched Nakamoto.com to much fanfare, as well as controversy surrounding the site’s choice of name. On the latest episode of Unqualified Opinions, Balaji and Ryan discuss the...
01.14.2020
Being a Blockchain CEO in 2020 with Algorand CEO Steve Kokinos
Gone are the days when a blockchain network could launch quietly, coordinated over an online forum by an anonymous developer or when a small number of technically minded people could participate in a low-profile token sale. While the early days...
01.08.2020
Bitcoin’s Civil War & Toxic Maximalism with Samson Mow
In this episode, we take a walk down memory lane through Bitcoin’s chaotic early years. Required listening for anyone who got into the industry post 2017 and is missing context behind some of Bitcoin’s longest standing feuds and divisions. We cover...
12.05.2019
The unintended consequences of platform economies with Matt Spoke
Matt Spoke is the founder and CEO of the Open Application Network, formerly known as Aion. In this discussion, Matt and Ryan discuss the OAN’s strategic shift to focusing on solving problems that exist within large online marketplaces. Matt lays...
12.03.2019
Public Blockchains for Enterprises with Oded Wertheim - CTO of Orbs
Oded Wertheim provides and update on Orbs, which is a project building public blockchain infrastructure designed for enterprises. In this conversation Oded details Orbs’s approach to collaborating with enterprises and how it differs from the private/permissioned approach taken by Hyperledger...

What's Messari's Unqualified Opinions about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Messari's Unqualified Opinions episodes:

India's Burgeoning Crypto Scene with WazirX CEO Nischal Shetty

Ledger CEO Pascal Gauthier on the Business of Being Your Own Bank

Charles Hoskinson on Cardano & Network Effects

Skale Labs CEO Jack O'Holleran on Launch & Decentralization

Insuring DeFi with Nexus Mutual Founder Hugh Karp

Tokensoft CEO Mason Borda on Security Token Hurdles & Pathways to Growth

Halving 2020: The Bitcoin Reformation with Tuur Demeester

Halving 2020: Bitcoin Then & Now with Charlie Shrem

Layer 1 CEO Alex Liegl on the Institutionalization of Mining in America

Halving 2020: Bobby Lee on Bitcoin in China & $100K BTC

Fireblocks CEO Michael Shaulov on Institutional Adoption and Stablecoin Disruption

Bison Trails CEO Joe Lallouz on Crypto Infrastructure & Working With Libra

Halving 2020: The History of Bitcoin OTC Markets with Dan Matuszewski

Ontology Co-founder Li Jun on Asia’s crypto ecosystem and the smart contracting landscape

Bitfinex CTO Paolo Ardoino on Tether’s Dominance and Spotting Fake Volume

ErisX CEO Thomas Chippas on Creating Regulated Crypto Markets

Midcap Doubleheader with Zcoin’s Reuben Yap and Zilliqa’s Colin JG Miles

Celo Founder Rene Reinsberg on Stablecoins, Emerging Markets & Financial Inclusion

Chad Cascarilla on the Early Days of Crypto, Regulation and Paxos’ Long Term Ambitions

Paxful CEO Ray Youssef on Bitcoin Usage in Africa and its Emerging Market Future

Anchorage’s Nathan McCauley on Custody, Libra, Bitcoin, XRP & crypto M&A

Ben Hunt on the future of money, crypto, and political power

The Bitcoin Custodian with BitGo CEO Mike Belshe

A Blockchain Future with Overstock CEO Jonathan Johnson

Exchange the US with Binance US CEO Catherine Coley

Digitizing the Dollar with Christopher Giancarlo

Power Laws with Meltem Demirors

Global Public Health with Alex Gladstein

Covering Crypto with Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal

Coinbase Law with Coinbase CLO Brian Brooks

Building Cardano with IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson

Bitcoin Past, Present & Future with Casa CTO Jameson Lopp

Crypto-plumbing with Arwen CEO Sharon Goldberg

The Dudas Abides with The Block CEO Mike Dudas

Virtual Private Networks with Orchid CEO Seven Waterhouse

The Bitcoin Institution with River Financial’s Alex Leishman

Special Edition: COVID-19 with Balaji Srinivasan

Dash’s Strategic Vision with Dash Core Group CEO Ryan Taylor

Enterprise Blockchains & CBDCs with R3 CTO Richard Brown

Crypto’s East-West Divide with Tron Founder Justin Sun

The Lending Machine with Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky

XRP - The Remittance Standard? with Bitso CEO Daniel Vogel

Building out the DEX Frontier with Radar CEO Alan Curtis

Stablecoins: The Big Picture with Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire

Cosmos & Beyond with Zaki Manian

Building a Crypto Civilization with Balaji Srinivasan

Being a Blockchain CEO in 2020 with Algorand CEO Steve Kokinos

Bitcoin’s Civil War & Toxic Maximalism with Samson Mow

The unintended consequences of platform economies with Matt Spoke

Public Blockchains for Enterprises with Oded Wertheim - CTO of Orbs