The Defiant

In this week’s episode I speak with E.G. Galano, cofounder of Infura, an infrastructure provider for Ethereum and other blockchains. Many Ethereum applications depend on Infura to run their nodes, and it became apparent why that’s problematic recently, when the service provider was having trouble connecting to the Ethereum blockchain, causing much of DeFi to break down. E.G. dives into the recent outage; he goes into what went wrong and what Infrua is doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again. He also talks about DeFi from the backstage perspective of an infrastructure provider, and what he says might get you feeling even more bullish on this space.

This weeks podcast episode is with Mona El Isa, the co-founder of Melon, a decentralized asset management protocol. Mona tells the story of how she started her career at Goldman Sachs trading equities, derivatives, and all kinds of financial instruments, for a decade. She then went to work with one of Goldman’s hedge fund clients, where she managed a long-short portfolio. With all that experience and $20 million dollars from a seed investor, she ventured on her own to launch a hedge fund —but failed. The time, costs and administrative hassle were too much to handle even with an investment of millions, which in that world, is actually pretty tiny. She came to the conclusion that the next step for her would be to build a blockchain-based protocol so that nobody would have to experience what she did when trying to set up an investment fund. A platform that made the process so much cheaper, faster and easier, that anybody could become a hedge fund manager. That’s how Melon Protocol came about.

In this week’s episode, I speak with Illia Polosukhin, cofounder of the Near Protocol and Fernando Martinelli, co-founder and CEO of Balancer Labs. Near is one of the up and coming Layer 1 chains, Balancer is a prominent DeFi protocol and application on Ethereum that will now also be on Near and other blockchains. As for Near being labeled an “Ethereum Killer” Illia says Near is “not trying to kill anybody.” He thinks finance is just a stepping stone for all the use cases enabled by blockchains and that Near can be the place where those consumer apps are built. Fernando says DeFi will live on many different Layer 1s, but he sees the space expanding into less than 10, not hundreds of chains. He remains very bullish on Ethereum and is betting on a flippening with Bitcoin in the near future, which Illia agreed would be “totally possible.”

In this week’s interview, I speak with Sam Bankman-Fried, co-founder and CEO of crypto liquidity provider Alameda Research and derivatives exchange FTX, and with Anatoly Yakovenko, the creator of the Solana blockchain. Bankman-Fried, recently announced the launch of Serum, a DEX built on the Solana blockchain. SBF has become known to be a ruthless trader, but he argues he’s simply using DeFi protocols for what they were made. For Anatoly, the end goal of Solana is to find the fastest and cheapest way to scale cryptography so that people are able to have ownership and participation in the applications they use, and so that the financial system can become more open efficient.

This week’s interview is with Trevor McFedries, who is behind Lil Miquela, a 19-year-old aspiring pop star with almost 3M Instagram followers, striking deals with Clavin Klein and Prada. But what’s more surprising is that she’s not human. She’s a computer-generated, character. The company that Trevor co-founded, called Brud, created her image and life story. It’s only fitting then that Lil Miquela, who lives in a digital world, will start to leverage digital tokens.

[Note: Trevor says in the interview a Miquela drop on SuperRare would happen on Oct. 30 or 31, but they’ve since changed the date to November 17. So you’re still on time to participate.]

The founder of Summa speaks to The Defiant about why he has become disillusioned with decentralized finance. Stories of financial inclusion are much rarer than stories of somebody raising hundreds of millions in a token sale or people throwing money at the latest yield farming protocol. Still, he’s encouraged by the fact that it is much easier to launch a financial service than it ever has been before.

In this week’s podcast episode I interview Tor Bair, the founder of Secret Foundation, an organization which promotes privacy-preserving technologies, with a focus on Secret Network. Secret Network is a proof-of-stake, Cosmos-based blockchain, which has the capacity to process private transactions and, notably, private smart contracts.

Tor says that for Web3 to develop into the open and permissionless system its builders want, privacy should be at the core. His biggest fear is that in a Web3 future, intead of having single corporations control our data, governments will have the same access too. Without private blockchains, Web3 could devolve to enable surveillance capitalism, where auditability is weaponized. Tor talks about the technologies that are being built today to stop that from happening.

I interviewed Simon Taylor. Simon has the rare quality of being very knowledgeable about decentralized finance but also about fintech. He is the co-founder at fintech consultancy firm, 11:FS, and he previously led blockchain research at Barclays. He also leads the excellent newsletter Fintech Brain Food.  Simon points to a world where fintech and defi start to converge. All the capital and users in the traditional finance will have to bridged into crypto at some point and that bridge can be fintech.

Hello Defiers! In this week’s interview, I spoke with Gavin McDermott. He's an investor at IDEO CoLab Ventures, the venture arm of design firm IDEO, and he’s one of the creators of Fair Launch Capital. While the name might suggest otherwise, Fair Launch Capital isn’t an investment firm, or at least it’s not a traditional investment firm. Instead, it gives startups no-strings-attached funding so that they can afford security audits and launch their projects in a safe way. They’re asked to consider paying it forward by returning at least the same amount they got but ideally more, to fund the next project.

The idea came after the team saw that many founders in crypto were feeling forced to either sell tokens before their platform launched or raise venture capital as one option to pay for audits, or release their projects without the proper security checks. Gavin is hoping fair launch capital provides a viable alternative to venture capital, even if it does end up disrupting his fund's own business model. Since the group unveiled this new funding mechanism late august, the term “fair launch” has taken a life of its own, becoming a gold standard for any new DeFi venture.

In this week’s episode, I spoke with Dan Elitzer and Clinton Bembry, who were part of the founding team of Yam. Yam Finance is an experiment in rebasing cryptocurrencies, plus token incentives, plus full on-chain governance, plus a DAO-like treasury managed by token holders. It’s also testing the power of the emoji and opened the flood gates to meme-based DeFi tokens.

Dan and Clinton tell me the back story of how this crazy project was created, how the group loosely coalesced in a chat group and from there it was just 10 days until launch. They talked about how the project blew past all their wildest expectations, and about the absolute terror of having hundreds of millions of dollars flow into the unaudited code they had pushed into the world.