Relay Chain

Polkadot and Web3 take center stage in this week's episode. Joe Petrowski (Research Analyst, Parity Technologies) speaks with Zoé Meckbach, a senior Polkadot ambassador and blockchain technology and cybersecurity advocate. They discuss the Polkadot and Web3 communities, the Polkadot ambassador program and what it’s like to be an ambassador, and some of the exciting things happening in the space.

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Special Guest: Zoé Meckbach.

This week we look at the intersection between journalism, freedom of the press, and technology. Joe Petrowski (Research Analyst, Parity Technologies) speaks with Harlo Holmes, Director of Digital Security at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. They discuss the role of journalism in a free society, the contemporary media landscape, the Snowden revelations, surveillance, the role of technology and privacy, the political implications of technology development, and best practices for whistleblowers.

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Key Quotes:

“Journalism’s role in society is as old as the printing press itself…. People have the right to know what’s going on. You can’t make informed decisions if you don’t know what’s going on.”

“Certain media sources are more skewed towards obfuscating rather than illuminating, and there has always been a challenge for individuals to find news sources that they can trust.”

“Historians will look at the rise of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter as a turning point in the way that the media has had to reevaluate its reach, reevaluate its funding model, and reevaluate how it presents itself to the public at large in order to secure its reach. This is quite a shift in the material of media itself.”

“People don’t necessarily realize that because the more digital aspects of our engagement are incredibly easy to parse, that opens us up to being entirely surveilled very easily and automatically”

“You have a profile, everybody is profiled based off their patterns of behavior on the internet however they interact with it, and you pretty much don’t live a day in your existence without interacting and without contributing to this profile.”

Special Guest: Harlo Holmes.

This week we look at proof-of-stake blockchain node infrastructure with the space’s leading solutions provider, Bison Trails. Joe Petrowski (Research Analyst, Parity Technologies) speaks with Aaron Henshaw, CTO and cofounder of Bison Trails, which pioneers blockchain node infrastructure and lowers the barrier to entry across multiple networks, including Polkadot, Cosmos, Eth 2.0, Near, Celo, and more. They discuss how and why Bison Trails was founded, the current state of node infrastructure, risk management, and possibilities for future development.

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Special Guest: Aaron Henshaw.

This week we dive into cross-network compatibility and interoperability between Polkadot and Ethereum. Joe Petrowski (Research Analyst, Parity Technologies) speaks with Derek Yoo of Moonbeam, an Ethereum-compatible smart contract parachain built on Substrate for Polkadot. They discuss Moonbeam and how it works, the role of smart contracts on Polkadot, the difference between Moonbeam and Ethereum layer-2 solutions, and the future of cross-network interoperability.

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Key Quotes:

“Part of our attraction to Polkadot is this ability for different chains to leverage each other’s specialized services.”

“[Kusama] is a pretty key competitive advantage to Substrate-based projects. This ability to move, maintain momentum and respond to what’s happening….You can have larger competitors but if you’re able to move faster and respond faster you can get a big competitive advantage.”

“[Interoperability] is more in changing people's minds than it being a technical problem. You’re always going to get a bit of tribalism at play in this space…but we’re drawn to the interoperability idea because it opens choices for developers to take advantage of the best that any given chain has to offer.”

Special Guest: Derek Yoo.

This week we talk to the Parity's head of security Kirill Pimenov about the shortcomings and potential of blockchain, open-source software and DLT.

Joe Petrowski (Research Analyst, Parity Technologies) speaks with Kirill Pimenov, head of security at Parity Technologies. The disruptive nature of blockchain has attracted many great minds from many backgrounds, and Kirill Pimenov's wealth of experience and knowledge clears up some of the hype and promises of blockchain regarding its relationship to power, raising capital, and freedom.

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The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work - Phillip Rogaway

Banana Split - Shamir Secret Sharing for people with friends

Highlights:

01:40 - Mining a Bitcoin block in 2010

03:02 - The ethics of open source

04:15 - Kirill's introduction to programming

10:05 - Blockchain as the field where money meets engineering

13:25 - The Silicon Valley version of the American Dream

15:30 - Blockchain is the first non-military application which pays people enough

16:45 - "The thing you're supposed to decentralize is power"

23:06 - What underlying principle led to the internet to being this way?

27:01 - How can users have a say in the way systems work?

32:07 - If you optimize for profit, you get immoral, profit-maximizing machines

36:52 - Can a decentralized system be corrupted?

43:05 - DLT and blockchain is short-sighted right now

50:12 - We haven't figured out how to beat the current financial system yet

52:18 - We can never build a fair system without humans in the loop

57:10 - Who are your role models?

Special Guest: Kirill Pimenov.

This week we talk to the Acala Network team and learn about the Acala Network and their Sovereign Wealth Fund.

Joe Petrowski (Research Analyst, Parity Technologies) speaks with Dr. Antonia Chen, Chief Econominst and Co-founder of Laminar and Acala, and Ruitao Su, CEO and Co-founder of Acala and Laminar. They are working on a governed protocol that enables decentralized finance applications on blockchain, allowing everyday users to join the DeFi revolution by leveraging the Acala stable token to create a Sovereign Wealth Fund and other defi applications.

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Highlights:

01:00 - How is the Acala stablecoin different from MakerDAO?

04:50 - Deploying custom logic to interact with the Acala stable token

05:12 - Homa: how your funds can do more

08:00 - What is the decentralized Sovereign Wealth Fund?

10:55 - How the Sovereign Wealth Fund can generate returns

15:30 - A comparison to traditional sovereign wealth funds

16:59 - The Sovereign Wealth Fund as a parachain and beyond

20:53 - The many functions of tokens on Acala and Polkadot

25:05 - A digital society with Acala on Polkadot and Web3

26:12 - How will people use the many different protocols of Polkadot and Acala

Special Guests: Antonia Chen and Ruitao Su.

This week we talk to the Acala Network team and learn about their ventures in DeFi on Polkadot and Ethereum.

Joe Petrowski (Research Analyst, Parity Technologies) speaks with Dr. Antonia Chen, Chief Econominst and Co-founder of Laminar and Acala, and Ruitao Su, CEO and Co-founder of Acala and Laminar. They are working on a governed protocol that enables decentralized finance applications on blockchain, allowing everyday users to join the DeFi revolution by having margin trading, synthetic assets, stable coins, and integrated money markets all on the Polkadot network.

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Highlights:

01:36 - What is Defi and how does it compare to traditional financial markets?

03:20 - What makes Defi more "fair" than traditional finance?

05:40 - What new things are possible with defi on blockchain?

10:20 - The limitations of DeFi

15:01 - 3 Protocols on Laminar: Margin trading, Synthetic assets and Integrated Money Markets

19:40 - 3 protocols on one chain or three?

21:15 - The issues with tokens on Ethereum

23:12 - Polkadot's shared security enabling better tokens / Why parachains are advantageous to smart contracts

26:05 - Dual-launch on Ethereum and Polkadot

30:04 - Going live on Polkadot

Special Guests: Antonia Chen and Ruitao Su.

This week we dive deep into the economics of cryptocurrencies, proof of stake scenarios, and Polkadot's application of security, interoperability and token economics.

Joe Petrowski (Research Analyst, Parity Technologies) speaks with Stefanie von Jan, an economics lecturer at the FOM University of Applied Sciences for Economics and Management in Munich, Germany. Her interests in Austrian economics, Blockchain technology, and token economics led to her providing her expertise with founders and academics, and now shares her latest insights about Bitcoin and Polkadot with us.

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02:15 - What makes blockchain economics unique?

03:50 - The Bitcoin token model

06:05 - A Keynesian cryptoeconomic model?

07:43 - Proof of Work vs. Proof of Stake

11:16 - How do we measure the value of a decentralized protocol?

13:42 - Are tokens tied to the value they intend to provide?

16:20 - Value competition of protocols and the applications on them

22:20 - What do Proof-of-Stake attack scenarios look like?

25:12 - Token security for Polkadot parachains

31:20 - The governance of parachain tokens

34:15 - Sound rule systems for parachains

Special Guest: Stefanie von Jan.

This week we talk about layer-2 scaling and quick and easy deployment of Dapps. Joe Petrowski (Research Analyst, Parity Technologies) speaks with Christine Perry of SKALE labs, a layer-2 solution that augments applications and transactions built on public blockchains such as Ethereum. They discuss the developer experience on Ethereum and SKALE, interesting blockchain use cases, and why layer-2 is the solution for creating usable and powerful Dapps.

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Special Guest: Christine Perry.

This week we meet at the intersection of blockchain, climate action, smart cities, finance, and IoT.

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*The dates of the events mentioned in the podcast may have shifted due to coronavirus pandemic

Special Guest: Anita Mujumdar.