The Crypto Conversation

Marouane Hajji is the protocol lead at Unslashed Finance, a decentralized insurance protocol built on Ethereum. Insurance is a part of the decentralized finance stack that has received less attention. However, crypto is no different from any other industry - there are many risks. Smart contract hacks, exploits, oracle manipulation, data breaches, theft, and so on. Creating an insurance protocol requires both technical skills and a deep understanding of risk modeling.

Unslashed clients include decentralized exchange aggregator ParaSwap, infrastructure provider Lido Finance, decentralized on-chain asset management platform Enzyme, and several crypto hedge funds such as Techemy Capital who leverage insurance to hedge a certain number of risks. Individual traders can also use Unslashed to hedge their risk profiles.

Unslashed uses a quantitative approach to model the risks and build out a decentralized insurance protocol that enables almost instant liquidity to insurance buyers and risk underwriters, ensures constant collateralization, and guarantees transparency.

In the Crypto Conversation hot take round Marouane reveals that he is a mega-fan of Battlestar Galactica.

Unslashed Finance

Unslashed on Medium

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Craig MacGregor is the founder of Taxoshi, a cryptocurrency tax calculator that helps Kiwis understand their crypto tax position. Taxoshi's algorithms automate the currency conversions and calculate your trading and mining loss and profit in accordance with the cryptocurrency guidance from the New Zealand IRD. Use the discount code "bravenewcoin" to get a 10% discount if you use Taxoshi.

Craig has been in the blockchain space for a number of years and is a co-founder of the Navcoin project. After making some capital gains from early crypto trading, Craig wanted to declare these to the IRD. He saw that there was a need for a simple solution that could help other Kiwis calculate their tax position quickly and easily. He built Taxoshi as that solution.

The IRD's position is that any time an individual makes a crypto to crypto trade, that is a taxable event that should be declared. The IRD estimates that there are between 25,000 and 100,000 people in New Zealand who have a tax obligation on their crypto assets. If you've never filed before, the IRD is currently allowing for voluntary disclosures from previous years.

Taxoshi

Navcoin

IRD Crypto Tax Guidance

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Richard Sanders is a co-founder and lead investigator at CipherBlade, an elite blockchain investigation agency that works closely with top crypto exchanges, blockchain protocols, and the FBI. In this episode, Rich explains his views on the sometimes shady world of crypto ATM operators, the confusing new BitClout platform, and we cover best practice crypto security tips.

Rich Sanders

CipherBlade uses a potent mix of on-chain and off-chain analytics and investigative techniques to track the most sophisticated cybercriminals on the planet. Using these techniques he has been tracking the transactions from crypto ATMs. Rich says many of these transactions are being sent to wallets linked to scammers.

Rich says just because VCs are involved with a project, it doesn't mean retail investors won't get burned. In fact, the ones with public team members are the soft exits that often end up mismanaged/shady. People think of this binary, like "it's a scam or not", where "scam" is defined as rug pull, it's a lot more nuanced.

The range of scammers and bad actors in the blockchain ecosystem runs the full gamut from the lowest to the highest basket of sophistication. The least sophisticated are Twitter and Telegram impersonation scammers, often based out of Nigeria. Many of these scammers don't use VPNs, they don't always use mixers and sometimes they use direct deposit addresses for exchanges. At the other end of the scale, you have very sophisticated hacking groups out of North Korea that use sophisticated mixing and crypto hopping techniques. What scammers have in common is they play on human greed, stupidity, and laziness.

CipherBlade

Richard on Twitter

Guide to Crypto Scams

Breach vectors used by scammers

What to do if you get SIM-Swapped

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Andy on Twitter

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Andy is joined by Samson Mow, CSO at Blockstream. Samson discusses the partnership between Blockstream and Seetee, a new Bitcoin company started by a 100-year-old company from Norway. He talks about the drop in hash power from Chinese miners as American miners increase, and he explains why he thinks Bitcoin will hit $100k in 2021 and could go even as high as $300K leaving $100K as the new price floor.

Two weeks ago, Aker, a 100-year old Norwegian company announced that it had established ("Seetee"), a new company dedicated to investing in projects throughout the Bitcoin ecosystem. Seetee said, "Bit­coin has in­spired us to chal­lenge our in­tu­itive un­der­stand­ing of money. Hav­ing fol­lowed the cryp­tocur­ren­cy dis­course for a while, we de­cid­ed to reach out to the en­gi­neers who made it their mis­sion to change the inner work­ings of mon­ey more than two decades ago. See­tee has formed a part­ner­ship with Block­stream, a glob­al leader in Bit­coin and blockchain tech­nol­o­gy. Blockstream's lead­er­ship in­cludes Adam Back, the in­ven­tor of Hash­cash, a 1997 pre­cur­sor to Bit­coin. With Block­stream as our part­ner, we are confi­dent that we can nav­i­gate this in­dus­try."

Key Takeaway:

Samson talks Blockstream, Liquid, why NFTs might be in a bubble and he gives the background and progress to Infinite Fleet, the epic sci-fi massively multiplayer online (MMO) strategy game he founded. Plus listen to the end of the show for a very special sci-fi easter egg!

Blockstream

Seetee Letter

Infinite Fleet

Seetee Ship

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Andy is joined by Zack Burks, CEO at the Mintable NFT marketplace, and Wladimir Baranoff-Rossine, grandson of the legendary Ukrainian, Russian and French painter. Mintable is hosting an exclusive NFT based collection of 10 drops, 4 auctions, and 1 original 96-year-old physical painting, all by Baranoff-Rossine. It's a historic first where avant-garde art meets the brave new world of NFTs.

Zach Burks and Wladimir Baranoff-Rossine

Zach and Wladimir have teamed up to create a collaboration that represents a piece of fine art and NFT history. The Mintable auction goes live on March 25 and is expected to attract interest from digital art collectors, the NFT ecosystem, and fine art connoisseurs. Listen to the episode to hear Zach talk about the new NFT creator economy, why we are not in an NFT bubble, and Wladimir explains the unique history of the pioneering artwork of his grandfather.

Mintable

Wladimir Baranoff-Rossine

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Jonas Simanavicius is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Syntropy. Syntropy, based in San Francisco, transforms the public internet into a secure and user-centric internet, where encryption and optimized performance are built-in and automatically enabled for anything and everything connected to it.

Jonas Simanavicius

Prior to founding Syntropy, Jonas worked on the engineering and application development teams of Royal Bank of Scotland and JPMorgan Chase. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering from the University of Edinburgh.

Syntropy Stack is a collection of tech and tools that allows anyone to build and deploy applications on Syntropy, with all connections optimized-for-performance and encrypted-by-default. It is compatible across millions of devices and services, including cloud, on-premise, and edge infrastructure. Syntropy Stack gives every developer the power and control to build on Syntropy's unifying layer.

Syntropy

Syntropy Stack

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Alex Mashinsky is the CEO and founder of Celsius, the platform that lets you earn interest on your crypto and use it as collateral to get fiat loans. Celsius offers a platform of curated services that have been abandoned by big banks – fair interest, zero fees, and fast transactions. Their goal is to disrupt the financial industry, one user at a time, and introduce financial freedom through crypto.

Alex Mashinsky

Alex explains the successful journey that has seen users deposit $10B in assets with Celsius. The Celsius token was one of the best-performing crypto assets in 2020.

Alex says Celsius is a supporter of DeFi and they are the bigger user of Aave, as one example. Celsius is aimed at noobs or everyday holders of Bitcoin and Ethereum and allows them to generate yield or get loans without the risk and knowledge barrier of DeFi.

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Celsius

Previous podcast with Alex

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Dr. Marc Fleury is the founder and CEO of Two Prime, a digital assets investment firm that invests in BTC and ETH. Marc has a PHD in theoretical physics and he is an open-source evangelist. Two Prime uses a variety of sophisticated hedging strategies to help high net worth individuals gain exposure to the upside potential of BTC and ETH but remain hedged against downside risk.

Dr. Marc Fleury joins Andy for a fascinating and wide ranging discussion on why Bitcoin is the most important decentralized, open-source project on the planet. Marc explains why he is involved with the Mont Pèlerin Society, a group of economists and intellectuals advocating for an open society and economy driven by free-market principles, personal and political liberty, and freedom of expression. Marc shares his views on post-capitalism, UBI, a world of abundance, and how we evolve to a sci-fi future.

Two Prime

Universal Paperclips

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Mark Berisha is the CEO of APECoin and the MemeFarm and BustAbnb ecosystems. APECoin embraces the humor and viral nature of memes to bring new participants into crypto. Apecoin is developing a game called "Bust-a-BNB" for Binance Smart Chain (BSC). An airdrop will occur for existing APE holders on March 14. GO APE!

The exponential growth of DeFi in the past nine months has sparked a flood of experimentation in smart-contract and Dapp design. The APEcoin Dev team realized the world is already farming memes, and created MemeFarm.io to get involved.

Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) can extend digital scarcity beyond currency to art, music, and design — any other form of expression that can be digitized. Suddenly, the control of scarcity and the ability to create a single verifiably unique version of anything digital is in the hands of the artists and creators where it belongs.

Today, artists and makers have few choices as to how they commercialize their NFTs. They can either find buyers themselves or set up an auction through platforms like Rarible — where their success will depend on how well they market their creations and how hard they work to establish a market price.

Mark thinks there is a better way. They could bootstrap the price discovery through a novel curation farming mechanic. Mark calls it the NFT DAO, and it could revolutionize how these trends interact on a whole new level.

NFT DAO offers a new choice to makers and artists:

• They can submit their NFTs to the NFT DAO. MemeFarm token holders vote to accept or reject submitted NFTs.
• The artists of the accepted NFTs then receive their share of NFT DAO's monthly rewards. And the farmers compete to 'mine' those NFTs.

APEcoin

Meme Farm

BustABNB

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Norwegian Billionaire Kjell Inge Røkke says that Aker ASA, his Norwegian fishing, oil, and engineering company has established Seetee, a new company dedicated to investing in projects and companies in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Seetee will keep all its liquid investable assets in bitcoin.

To announce this decision, Mr Røkke wrote a letter to shareholders. The letter is one of the most bullish Bitcoin letters published this year and points towards the changing narratives around Bitcoin mining and how Bitcoin may help speed up the global transition to renewable energy.

The Letter

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