Apolline Blandin, cryptocurrency research lead at the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance, joins the show. In this episode: 

• The Cambridge AltFin research agenda
• The motivation behind the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
• How they determine Bitcoin's electricity consumption
• How Bitcoin's energy usage can be understood in context
• The genesis of their new geographical mining estimates
• Why high granularity estimates of mining location are so important to determine its energy mix
• How and why Bitcoin hashpower migrates on a seasonal basis
• Why there is so much spare hydro capacity in Sichuan and Yunnan
• Surprising country-level findings
• The most defensible academic approaches Apolline has seen so far
• Why the per-transaction cost estimates of Bitcoin are misleading
• The prospects for wind, solar, and natural gas for bitcoin mining

Matt and Nic review the top stories of the week in the cryptoasset industry, featuring special guest Matt Hougan, global head of research at Bitwise. In today's episode:

• Tagomi is acquired by Coinbase
• Matt Hougan's response to Goldman's bearish note
• What wealth managers are saying about Bitcoin today
• Light at the end of the tunnel in the CSW saga?
• BitClave's punishing SEC settlement
• Calibra rebrands
• A new paper on Bitcoin Vaults

Dan Matuszewski, Principal and Co-Founder of CMS Holdings joins the show once again. Since he last appeared, the market has been through some gut-wrenching turmoil, and Tether (one of the subjects of the first episode) has tacked on a casual $5B in market cap. Dan, alongside his colleagues at CMS, has also joined the Crypto Twitter fray.

In this episode:

• Why Dan relented and started a twitter account
• Dan's explanation for the massive growth of Tether since March
• Whether there is non-crypto business occuring in Tether
• What we can expect for the Tether-denominated futures markets if it trades below par
• How Dan thinks about using Tether on Omni versus Ethereum versus Tron
• What Dan makes of the rise in CME open interest

Matt and Nic review the top stories of the week in the cryptoasset industry. In this week's episode:

• The story behind bitcoin pizza day
• The impact of hashrate futures
• Genesis Capital's acquisition of Vo1t and what that means for their business
• Why the DTCC should get into crypto
• Brian Brooks becoming acting Comptroller of the currency
• Our analysis of the coins from feb. 2009 reawakening
• Our theory for why those ancient coins might be moving now
• The great Bitcoin energy consumption debate
• Nic gets unblocked by CZ

Tim Kelly, founder and CEO of BitOoda joins the show. BitOoda is a financial services firm that is innovating in the field of structured products based on Bitcoin hashrate and difficulty. In this show we discuss:

• Tim’s career background and the similarities he sees with cryptoassets vs. other asset classes he has traded
• The mining ecosystem and how derivative contracts solve real business needs
• The evolving market structure for cryptoasset derivatives and Tim’s view on the regulatory landscape

To learn more about BitOoda visit: http://bitooda.io/

Nic and Matt cover the week's deals and news. In this episode: 

• Bitcoin full node count
• Celo and the viability of seigniorage shares stablecoins
• Telegram winding down their TON project
• Why we think the SAFT window of opportunity is closed
• Why the SAFT is just ICOs in a suit
• Why the next global monetary asset will never be massively premined and disproportionately owned by VC funds
• How the success of Bitcoin drove VC funds crazy
• Stablecoins pass $10B
• ErisX announces Ethereum physically settled futures
• How futures contracts would handle contested hard forks
• The importance of JPM banking Coinbase and Gemini
• Our retrospective on the halving
• What we're reading and listening to this week
• Why we don't believe in space mining

Peer to peer marketplaces are a wealth of data on genuine demand for Bitcoin – but not in the way you might think. As it turns out, a large fraction of the volume in these markets relates to complex, multi-step trades designed to use Bitcoin as a bridge currency to move fiat-denominated remittances, especially into countries like Venezuela.

Matt Ahlborg, data scientist and creator of UsefulTulips.org, has done great work compiling this data and engaging with these traders to determine what exactly is happening on these opaque marketplaces, and what Bitcoin is being used for. In this episode we cover:

• How Matt went from working in the Navy to pursuing a career in Bitcoin data science
• Why p2p exchange volume is more reliable
• What a massive blackout in Venezuela tells us about foreign exchange flows in Latin America
• How exactly Bitcoin works as a bridge currency on p2p exchanges
• The under-reported role of Chinese exporters in Venezuela on LocalBitcoins
• Matt's investigation into how Argentine capital controls are driving p2p Bitcoin volumes
• Why Bitcoin still dominates in p2p markets rather than stablecoins
• Why p2p volumes are likely significantly larger than the reported numbers

In this episode, we talk to Patrick Dugan, coiner of the term 'crypto-dollarization'. Patrick has a wealth of knowledge regarding stablecoins and the prospects for public blockchains to carry fiat-denominated value. Covered in this episode: 

• His formative experiences living under capital controls in Argentina
• How Patrick's time in LatAm taught him about dollarization
• Political drivers of the dollar's predominance in LATAM
• How Patrick realized that crypto-dollarization would be important
• Patrick's experiences working for the Omni Layer Foundation
• Patrick's analysis of the earliest stablecoins like BitUSD, Nubits, and Tether (Omni)
• Patrick's analysis of the stablecoin models which are most likely to succeed long-term
• Likely geopolitical effects of crypto-dollarization

Matt and Nic review the top stories of the week in the cryptoasset industry. This week’s topics include:

• Renowned commodities investor Paul Tudor Jones announces his intent to trade Bitcoin and releases a Bitcoin thesis
• NEAR protocol gets funded
• Are fair launches dead?
• The under-appreciated merit of PoW issuance
• Libra's new CEO hire
• Wyoming's Special-Purpose Depository Institution legislation
• The privacy-auditability tradeoff in blockchains
• Whether the growth of stablecoins threatens the security model of public blockchains
• Thoughts on the imminent halving
• Our guess of who the next high profile hedge fund investor will be to flip bullish on Bitcoin

The question of Tether's influence on crypto markets has long vexed practitioners and academics. In a widely-publicized 2018 paper, academics Griffin and Shams allege that Tether was being issued collusively, effectively increasing the price of Bitcoin beyond its natural level. 

To learn how Tether behaves like a currency board, and to assess the veracity of the Griffin & Shams hypothesis in light of new data, we brought Ganesh Viswanath-Natraj on to the show. Ganesh is an Assistant Professor of Finance at Warwick Business School, covering international finance and macroeconomics, with a focus on foreign exchange derivatives, market microstructure and cryptocurrencies.

Find the full text of the paper here, and follow Ganesh's work on his personal website.