The Defiant

In this week’s episode I interview Kayvon Tehranian, founder & CEO of Foundation, a platform for minting, buying and selling non-fungible tokens. We talked about the future of the internet —Kayvon believes blockchains are adding property rights to the internet. He also thinks that instead of having to wait for old institutions to come online, new ones in the form of decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOS, will be built. He foresees a future when a lot of people will start saying, ‘why aren't you asking me to connect my wallet? Why do I have to log in this other way, that I don't have control over what I'm doing?’ I also believe that future is not so far away.

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In today’s episode, we interview Preston Van Loon. Preston co-founded Prysmatic Labs, one of the main teams building Ethereum 2.0, and has been leading that team for the past three years. On top of that, he recently founded a DeFi project which bundles the entire crypto market cap in one token to allow anyone to easily buy something like a crypto index. Preston talks about the latest in ETH2  —he says Etheruem’s big migration into its proof-of-stake chain is about six months away, give or take two months. He says Ethereum may be at a disadvantage relative to other Layer 1s, which are launching with more scalable technologies. But he also believes it will be hard for other chains to build the community Ethereum has, faster than Ethereum will upgrade.

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In this week’s podcast we interview Santiago Siri, who has been working on improving the way democracy works for over a decade. He started from the inside, co-founding a political party in Argentina, his home country, but realized traditional politics would change him before he could change politics. So he started building better representation for the new world and founded Democracy Earth Foundation. It’s worth noting, that he’s been hacked by communists two times in the process.

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In this week’s episode, we talk with Varun Kumar and Pranay Mohan from Hashflow, a new decentralized exchange that wants to unbundle Uniswap. What this means is, they want to keep the non-custodial side and the liquidity pools, but instead of finding prices with smart contacts and a formula, they use market makers applying their highly specialized strategies and algorithms behind the scenes. Anyone can become a market maker, and some may open their pools so that others will be able to share their capital in exchange for a portion of trading fees. Their bet is that they will combine machines and humans in just the right way, to provide cheaper rates at lower prices.

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In this week’s episode, we interview Do Kwon, cofounder of the Terra ecosystem which includes a payments network, a stablecoin, a lending protocol and a synthetic assets platform. We talk about how he was able to achieve what most crypto companies can’t which is to get a broad non-crypto native user base. Terra’s Chai payments system, which uses the Terra stablecoin, has about 2.6M active users in Korea. Kwon says there’s so much money to be made without bringing new people in, that many developers just settle with looking inwards in crypto.

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In this week's episode we interview 0xMaki, an anonymous DeFi developer contributing to SushiSwap and Yearn Finance protocols. We talk about growing Sushi beyond its drama-filled beginnings as a fork of Uniswap, into a DEX that can hold its own as the second-most active trading platform in Ethereum DeFi. He goes into the main pieces that set SushiSwap apart with its margin trading and a soon-to-be-released smart contract suite to easily launch tokens. He says, it’s short-sighted for DEX competitors to be fighting among each other, as they should be fighting outwards, to bring more people into DeFi, and not inwards trying to win over the people who are already here.

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In this week’s episode we talk with the DeFi artist of the moment. Pplpleasr got into DeFi drawn in by the crazy yields but really stayed when she resonated with the community  —the gaming-like, niche subculture of memes and internet-native humor. She started making videos for many DeFi teams, from Yeran to Pickle Finance. Her latest and best-known work though is the video she made for the highly anticipated v3 of Uniswap. The clip of a unicorn in an otherworldly oasis, Ethereum dapp symbols floating about, gained her universal praise. But it’s what happened later when it gets really interesting. Pplpleasr decided, like many other artists these days, to sell the video as an NFT. But unlike most artists fetching big chunks of cash, she was set on donating the proceeds to charity. Also unlike other auctions, it was a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, created just for the occasion, what ended up winning the piece.

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Jim Bianco has decades of experience as a macro markets researcher. He's been leading his firm Bianco Research since 1990 and was at UBS and Lehman Brothers before that.  It was after installing MetaMask, and doing some yield farming and NFT investing, that he realized, DeFi is a new financial system, and it will replace the old one. And the reason is simple: it’s just better. He has carefully brought this up to his clients, but it’s been tough. Those that don’t underestimate open finance, are waiting to retire before they have to catch up. But Bianco thinks DeFi is taking over sooner than they think.

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In this week’s episode we speak with Antonio Juliano, founder and CEO of dYdX, one of the biggest decentralized exchanges on Ethereum, focusing on derivatives. dYdX recently made news by being one of the first major DeFi projects to move to Layer 2. 

One of the main goals for his team this year will be to further decentralize dYdX, Juliano said, from the order book to the control of their smart contracts. So yes, for those reading between the lines, that means decentralized governance, and Juliano isn’t ruling out a dYdX token. Juliano believes derivatives are going to be the biggest products in crypto and so his long-term goal is for dYdX to become one of the biggest crypto exchanges, period. He knows DEXes are just 5% of total crypto volume, but that’s up from 0% two years ago. He says, a lot of people are seeing the writing on the wall.

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In this week’s episode we speak with Mike Novogratz, the CEO of Galaxy Digital. He started his career at Goldman Sachs and then led a macro hedge fund at Fortress, which was shuttered in 2015. He then went all-in on crypto, in part thanks to convincing from his college roommate Joe Lubin, and founded Galaxy Digital, an investment bank for digital assets. After grinding through the 2018 and 2019 bear market, Mike says he can finally breathe. He is convinced that Bitcoin is finally derisked.

While Bitcoin is firmly established as digital gold, to him, Ethereum is a venture bet because it’s not totally finished yet. It's getting there, and so the bet is it's going to happen, not that it's happened. Novo is wildly bullish DeFi. He says the threat to the banking system and payments is DeFi, not Bitcoin. But that also means the big guys are going to fight back with lobbying and regulation because protocols like Uniswap and Aave are going after their business.

About the hype and rally in the crypto market, Novo says this time it’s different. Unlike in 2017, he doesn’t believe we’re in a bubble. He says we’re in a movement.

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