The Defiant

Microsoft is a Web2 giant producing software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services.

Yorke shares his experience working at Microsoft in a strategy and transformation role in blockchain and Web3 technology, specifically focusing on producing a blockchain-based full-stack application within one of the largest supply chains in the world.

We dive into what Microsoft is doing within the blockchain space, how Microsoft is using NFTs internally, and the use-cases of Ethereum and IPFS inside the company.

We also talk about the different CEOs that have led Microsoft over the years and even get into the rumors of Google choosing their slogan "Don’t Be Evil" because of Microsoft.

Thanking our podcast sponsors:

Dear Defiers,

In addition to our weekly podcast series, we are happy to now bring our Weekly Recap show to all podcast platforms. Weekly Recap is a show where we discuss the hottest news of the week together with The Defiant writers and share further insights from our reports. It goes live on our YouTube channel every Friday.

In this week's recap, we discussed SBF getting bailed out of jail, stablecoin adoption, Visa's plans for non-custodial auto-payments, and more.

Hope you enjoy it! Also, a quick side note, make sure to check out our YouTube channel to keep up with our regular uploads on DeFi news, market updates, monthly investigations and more to come soon.

This week on The Defiant Podcast, we speak with Adam Cochran, an investor at Cinneamhain Ventures, who's probably most known for his extensive Twitter threads.

We kick off our conversation by asking Adam if he expected to turn into a meme in the crypto community for his long-winded tweets.

The primary driver behind crypto this year has been traditional macro markets. Crypto markets have been at the mercy of inflation and rising interest rates and the FED recently raised interest rates by half a point. Adam talks about where he thinks rates and inflation are headed and how will that impact crypto.

The coins mentioned on Adam’s shopping list from December 2021 have approximately lost 80% of their value this year. For comparison, Bitcoin has dropped 60%. We talk about the thesis behind the list and whether he’s changing it for next year.  Adam says that he adjusted to the market conditions and had been shorting throughout the year, compensating for some of his long positions.

Finally, Adam shares some trade ideas for 2023.

Thanking our podcast sponsors:

Dear Defiers,

In addition to our weekly podcast series, we are happy to now bring our Weekly Recap show to all podcast platforms. Weekly Recap is a show where we discuss the hottest news of the week together with The Defiant writers and share further insights from our reports. It goes live on our YouTube channel every Friday.

In this week's recap, we discussed SBF getting arrested, the Binance investigation, Trump NFTs and more.

Hope you enjoy it! Also, a quick side note, make sure to check out our YouTube channel to keep up with our regular uploads on DeFi news, market updates, monthly investigations and more to come soon.

This week on The Defiant Podcast, we speak with Mike Belshe, the CEO of BitGo, a digital asset custodian, wallet, and issuer of wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC).

We start our conversation with an overview of BitGo and Mike's crypto journey.

Wrapped Bitcoin is the most successful representation of Bitcoin on Ethereum. There’s about 200K Bitcoin in BitGo's custody, which is the equivalent of $3.4B. WBTC is an important piece of the ecosystem as it enables Bitcoin holders to interact with DeFi. We dive into the recent selloff that saw WBTC lose its peg to Bitcoin.

In the final part of our conversation, we discuss the role of custodians in the crypto space. Especially after what happened this year with FTX and various other centralized entities, crypto has been given a wake-up call to bring transparency and disclosures to CeFi. We explore the biggest lessons we can take away from this year.

Thanking our podcast sponsors:

Dear Defiers, 

In addition to our weekly podcast series, we are happy to now bring our Weekly Recap show to all podcast platforms. Weekly Recap is a show where we discuss the hottest news of the week together with The Defiant writers and share further insights from our reports. It goes live on our YouTube channel every Friday. 

In this week's recap, we discussed SBF agreeing to testify before Congress, Vitalik's favorite things, Apecoin and Link staking, and the Ethereum roadmap. 

Hope you enjoy it! Also, a quick side note, make sure to check out our YouTube channel to keep up with our regular uploads on DeFi news, market updates, monthly investigations and more to come soon.

This week on The Defiant Podcast, we speak with Sam Williams, the co-founder and CEO of Arweave, a 'collectively owned hard drive' that enables users to store data, applications, and documents on-chain, forever.

We start by learning about Sam's crypto journey, from discovering Bitcoin in 2010 and going on to invest in the Ethereum ICO and finally, starting Arweave.

Sam thinks we're seeing a renewed focus on decentralization as the debate over censoring transactions continues. He believes it's essential to keep a neutral historical record that future generations can learn from.

We go on to dive into the varied use cases of Arweave, what Sam says to those that say Arweave might be too expensive to store certain files, how Arweave is used to store NFTs so that they can live forever, and how you can earn money with Arweave.

Thanking our podcast sponsors:

Dear Defiers, 

In addition to our weekly podcast series, we are happy to now bring our Weekly Recap show to all podcast platforms. Weekly Recap is a show where we discuss the hottest news of the week together with The Defiant writers and share further insights from our reports. It goes live on our YouTube channel every Friday. 

In this week's recap, we discussed SBF's recent public appearances, the ongoing manhunt in The Bahamas, Uniswap’s NFT marketplace and more. Hope you enjoy it. 

Also, a quick side note, make sure to check out our YouTube channel to keep up with our regular uploads on DeFi news, market updates, monthly investigations and more to come soon.

This week on The Defiant Podcast, we speak with Juan Benet, the founder of Protocol Labs and the inventor of the InterPlanetary File System.

Juan is also the creator of Filecoin, a storage network incentivized by crypto. Both of Juan’s ventures are hugely ambitious as they are in direct competition with the basic rails of the internet, with protocols such as HTTP and data giants like AWS. We begin our conversation with Juan explaining what led him to start IPFS and Filecoin.

Juan points out that all of the layers of the internet that run below the application layer, rely on trust. He believes that the promise of web3 is to be able to upgrade the whole stack with trust-minimized public verifiability primitives.

One of the key innovations of IPFS is in data addressing, which increases the efficiency of data fetching. But there’s more to IPFS than just this, and we talk about some of the other features of IPFS.

Juan says universities would be a good next step to expand the user base of Filecoin since they deal with large amounts of data and run intensive computations. We go on to discuss Filecoin's plans to encourage the adoption of its technology beyond web3 users.

Thanking our podcast sponsors:

Dear Defiers, 

In addition to our weekly podcast series, we are happy to now bring our Weekly Recap show to all podcast platforms. 

Weekly Recap is a show where we discuss the hottest news of the week together with The Defiant writers and share further insights from our reports. It goes live on our YouTube channel every Friday. 

In this week's recap, we went through all the latest on FTX, discussed MetaMask collecting user addresses, update on arrested Tornado Cash developer and more. Hope you enjoy it! 

Also, a quick side note, make sure to check out our YouTube channel to keep up with our regular uploads on DeFi news, market updates, monthly investigations and more to come soon.