The Blockchain Show

Vamshi is the CEO and co-founder of BearTax. He joins Ethan to explain how his team's software is helping cryptocurrency traders file taxes with ease and confidence.

With tax season upon us, learn the IRS's latest stance on crypto and what that means for investors and businesses. Also why it's crucial to classify cryptocurrency income appropriately, both gains and losses, and how accurate record keeping goes a long way. Vamshi speaks to why this is so and some of the advantages of their smart matching program across multiple exchange platforms. Users can even go backwards to update previous returns and become current on back taxes.

Ethan is joined by Evan Kuo from Ampleforth, for a exploration into the potential of DeFi - Decentralized Finance.

Today's decentralized assets, such as Bitcoin and ETH, can be seen as the primitive building blocks for tomorrow's DeFi use-cases. These include lending, debt, and synthetic equities, however, we quickly come to a realization of their inherent limitations. Evan breaks down how their limitations are due to their high correlation to each other and why they bring about the need for extreme overcollateralization and the risk of autoliquidation.

This brings up a big problem in crypto that not many are addressing. The diversification of these primitive building blocks will be required for DeFi to reach its potential. Hypercorrelation is a huge problem, one that threatens the very viability of cryptocurrency. 

Further topics covered in this episode:

• The AMPL is a decentralized commodity-money like Bitcoin, but with near perfect supply-elasticity like fiat.
• Its protocol automatically increases or decreases the quantity of tokens each user holds in response to 24 hr volume weighted price by adjusting a global scalar variable (similar to a gravitational constant or coefficient of expansion).
• Because traders of this coin realize gains and losses in quantity as well as price, the protocol introduces a fundamentally new set of incentives--requiring profit-maximizing users to trade in a different manner. 
• Ultimately, unique behavior in response to these incentives creates a new different movement pattern, resulting in lower correlation with bitcoin and floating price assets today. 

David Kemmerer is the CEO and Co-Founder at CryptoTrader.Tax the largest cryptocurrency tax reporting software in the U.S.

With the new cryptocurrency question on the IRS 1040 Schedule 1, all U.S. taxpayers will, for the first time, be asked to declare crypto on their income tax return. 

David speaks to where the IRS is in regard to cryptocurrency and where this space is heading.

Jack O'Holleran is the Co-Founder and CEO at SKALE Labs.

SKALE is an Ethereum-compatible network with a leaderless consensus designed to run on an uncapped number of independent nodes, each of which will be providing resources to multiple high performance decentralized elastic blockchains.

Ethan interviews Ivo Georgiev, the CEO of AdEx Network an up-and-coming adtech blockchain startup. They've received recognition within the Ethereum community since 2017 for constantly innovating on their technology.

Ivo explains how they've managed to build the largest payment channels network on Ethereum, how they're bringing in clients from outside of crypto, the challenges of building a Web 3.0 startup, the similarity and differences to Brave, the hype around DeFi, and more.

Michael Shaulov is the CEO and Co-Founder of Fireblocks, a secure transfer environment that gives financial institutions a safe way to move blockchain-based digital assets. Since launching in June, Fireblocks has secured more than $9 billion in digital assets

Luke Stokes is the Managing Director at FIO https://fio.foundation

The Foundation for Interwallet Operability (FIO) is a consortium of leading wallets, exchanges, and crypto payment processors supporting the FIO Protocol. FIO Members are early supporters who intend to integrate the protocol into their respective products and provide assistance/guidance in its direction.

He brings Ethan up to speed on the new developments since we last spoke with David Gold in March of last year.

Kadena Head of Research and Networks Monica Quaintance joins The Blockchain Show host Ethan to discuss today's hybrid blockchain launch.

Ethan is joined by Danny Kim, Head of Growth at SFOX, a crypto trading platform and prime dealer for whale traders and institutional investors that's connected to over 20 exchanges and OTC desks to provide a single point of access to crypto markets. SFOX has quietly performed over $11B in transactions and works with some of the biggest names in crypto.

Topics covered include:

• Danny's Career: What lead him from his traditional banking job into the then unknown, wild world of crypto, ignoring concerns from his mentors and peers. (And whether it was worth it.)
• Danny tells us about SFOX – and what even is a Prime Dealer? Why a single point of liquidity to all the major crypto exchanges and OTC desks is key for institutional and retail adoption of crypto trading.
• How SFOX is designed for traders: SFOX’s suite of algorithms – and SFOX's FoxEye suite of trading tools for personalized trading strategies. 
• Traders Insurance: SFOX provides its traders with industry-first FDIC-insured accounts; why qualified insurance is vital for institutional adoption.  

• What type of institutions are getting into crypto? From family offices and hedge funds to money managers, SFOX is seeing a wide variety of institutional investors gaining exposure to digital assets. 
• Why segregated accounts are crucial to institutional investment in cryptocurrencies, and how the QuadrigaCX debacle exposed the current model as flawed.

Happy New Year! Ethan sends his gratitude to the listeners, co-hosts, guests, and sponsors that have made this last year possible. As he reflects on some of last years memorable moments, he offers some vision for the future of the space and podcast.