Still Early Podcast

Grant sat down with Avery Bartlett, the mastermind behind Avalanche Crocs. In this conversation, Grant and Avery discussed crypto marketing and some of the tactics projects will use to grab your attention. Avery is a self-confessed Swiss army knife at Ava Labs who churns out some of the best video content this space has to offer. The conversation leads to how crypto projects can properly use YouTube Shorts and TikTok to help grow their brand awareness and how NOT to do it. Avery also spills the Avalanche and AVAX alpha for 2024 later in the episode. You will learn what is Teleporter a new cross-chain messaging protocol built on Avalanche, enabling subnets to communicate with one another. This is such a huge step forward for account abstraction and overall crypto UX.

Grant sat down with Jordi Alexander, the founder and chief investment officer at Selini Capital, one-quarter of the Steady Lads and Alchemist at Mantle. In this conversation, you will hear Jordi explain his predictions on where the hot ball of money will flow following the Bitcoin ETF, how market-making firms are positioning in the Bitcoin spot ETF world, the development process behind one of the highest paying liquid staking tokens on the market; mETH and how Mantle is positioning itself as an Ethereum L2.

Grant welcomes dedicated DeFi disciple Patrick Scott to Still Early, co-founder of CoinBeats and Dynamo DeFi to discuss one of our favorite topics - building a media business.

With new content creators popping up all the time in this industry, cutting through the noise is tough if you’re looking for information. And if you’re set on starting your own content channel - where do you even start?

But what does it take to create a brand and voice that carries weight and respect? Patrick gives Grant insight on it all, from what CoinBeats is and how they’re innovating the approach to crypto marketing, as well as discussing growth strategies for building an audience across different mediums.

Grant was joined by Noah from NodeKit to discuss a topic that not a lot of Ethereum maximalists want to discuss... how do we decentralize the L2s and sequencers?A lot of concern is floating around the crypto and DeFi space due to the centralization of specific aspects of a lot of Layer 2 scaling solutions on Arbitrum, Optimism and other popular chains. NodeKit is developing the SEQ chain which allows L2s, RollApps and app-chains to utilise a decentralized shared sequencer, have complete flexibility over their modular stack, including using Eigen Layer, Celestia or Avail for Data Availability and also reduces the fragmentation of liquidity and composability. This is only going to become more of an issue as the development of Layer 2s, app-chains, and more continues at a rapid pace.

Grant was joined by Corey from Mirai Labs, a Web3 gaming studio that is focused on bringing users games they actually want to play... who would have thought?!Their initial game, Pegaxy, was one of the first GameFi projects that took the industry by storm during the days in which Axie Infinity was all the rage. Now, they have regrouped and begun to push out some seriously impressive games, such as Petopia (live now in the AppStore and Android store). In this interview, we go through some of the more slept-on areas of web3 gaming that users may not be aware of and what will come in 2024 from the Mirai Labs camp.

Grant sat down with Cooper from Movement Labs to chat about one of the most exciting crypto narratives the industry is about to discuss: Move... Move is a programming language created during Facebook's (Meta) expansion into crypto with Lybra and Diem. This project faced immense backlash due to the size of Facebook and its potential influence when controlling its own currency. From there, two teams, Aptos and Mysten Labs (Sui), spun out to expand on their research and created two independent Move-based blockchains. Movement is on a mission to create a global community of Move builders, working together to increase the security, performance, and user experience of building in decentralized networks.Learn more about the pros of Move vs Solidity and how the MoveEVM can overtake the EVM and even other VMs soon. If you have ever worried about hacks in DeFi and even if the likes of Ethereum can scale, Move as a smart contract language is certainly one to keep a close eye on, in our opinion.

Grant sat down with Emin Gün Sirer, the founder of Ava Labs, to chat about how the Avalanche and AVAX ecosystems are scaling. The avalanche subnet architecture is extremely impressive when it comes to bespoke blockchain deployment for any use case. Recently we have seen a wide range of applications such as JP Morgan tokenizing funds on their on Subnet, Shrapnel and Off The Grid releasing their gaming subnets and even Hubble Protocol a perpetual exchange DEX that uses USDC to settle trades. With the proliferation of L2s and a lot of pushback around their composability, security risk i.e. multi-sig contracts and expensive over heads, Avalanche subnets are certainly one to watch over the coming years. In this episode, the pair chatted about Emin's early days pre-Bitcoin whitepaper, where he was developing distributed systems to enable the permissionless transfer of digital assets. It is interesting to hear how Emin's journey has led him to be in the position he is now.

Grant was joined by Theodore Agranat from Gunzilla Games who are the creative studio behind the highly anticipated Off The Grid. For those unaware Off The Grid is potentially THE Web3 game that everyone has been waiting for. The all-star team with an extremely impressive pedigree have worked on previous games and movies including; District 9, Elysium and Warface. As you may have guessed by now we are covering an awful lot of the Avalanche ecosystem on Still Early and Gunzilla are launching their own Avalanche Subnet to enable crypto rails in all their productions. OTG delivers a brand-new AAA battle royale third-person shooter experience. Set in a dystopian cyberpunk future, 150 players duke it out across a tropical island while pursuing an immersive 60-hour narrative campaign.OTG aims to evolve the genre by strongly emphasizing its incredible story, giving players the freedom to impact the game with each decision they make. Gamers can craft and customize their in-game items to create their perfect Zero and emerge as the victor!

Grant sat down with Breevie from GoGoPool a Subnet infrastructure services provider on Avalanche. Subnets are a core component of scaling the Avlanache network and with the likes of Shrapnel, Gunzilla, TSM, DeFi Kingdoms and even JP Morgan deploying their own subnets, it is worth keeping an eye on how this develops. Aside from that the pair discussed some of the bear market pain that Breevie endured by being extremely overexposed to the Terra Luna ecosystem. Will LUNA come back? That is yet to be seen. But UST has been moving recently which feels very weird indeed.

Grant and Matt of TapiocaDAO sit down for a chat about the shortcomings of many DeFi protocols and how Tapioca seeks to address them, including issues with liquidity mining, airdrops without purpose, and excessive spending on incentives.
The two discuss Matt’s ‘Death of Liquidity Mining’ articles, parts 1 and 2, and deliver some valuable insights as they explore LayerZero, Chainlink, Celestia and other protocols shaping the future of DeFi.