This episode, we speak to Arjun Bhuptani, co-creator of MolochDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) created to fund Ethereum 2 grants, and to help solve the coordination problems in funding open-source protocols.

We discuss how most problems stem from coordination, the importance of funding public goods, cost of legal documents vs automated systems allowing for anonymous funding, and treating economics and governance in a scientific way.

In this Founders of Web 3 special, Jamie Burke reads his recently published thesis, 'The Open Metaverse OS' a collaborative piece, from across the Outlier Ventures network, discussing the future of NFTs, DeFi and Web3. The book proposes an antidote to Web2, and a thesis, for how we can achieve an Open Metaverse.

We talk with Joe Lallouz about Bison Trail’s recent acquisition by Coinbase, and why it is a net good for the wider crypto ecosystem. As a serial founder, who has now enjoyed multiple exits we hear about the process of an M&A from the inside, and explore Bisom Trail’s continuing mission to not just serve the biggest corporations in the space, like Coinbase or Facebook Libra, but the longtail of dApps and startups through a commitment to the democratization of finance technology. 

Vivek, Executive Director of Polkadex, discusses how, by leveraging the benefits of building on Polkadot and taking the best of centralised exchanges such as order books and combining it with innovations in DEX's, they have created a hybrid model which tackles industry challenges in price slippage, impermanent loss and democratises DeFi, by removing fees and front running.

Jamie talks to Sandeep who founded Matic Network, now Polygon, about building a layer 2 network for sidechains, rollups and blockchains in a mission to fix Ethereum’s transaction limitations.

Today, we talk to Ryan Gill, co-founder of Crucible Network who are pioneering direct-to-avatar commerce in the Metaverse.

We talk to Sam cofounder of Arweave about their radically different approach to DApps (decentralized applications) as DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations), how he believes they will displace Web 2 platforms and companies entirely, how this vision fits with current data regulations such as GDPR in Europe, and the social mission behind The Permaweb; allowing us to remember and preserve valuable information, apps, and history indefinitely preventing others from rewriting it.

We talk to Amir who (alongside Shawn Fanning of Napster fame) founded Helium the world's first peer-to-peer wireless network and their decade journey to flip the telco model and create a people’s network, inspired by Bitcoin and Filecoin, to what are now 17963 Hotspots globally including partnerships Salesforce and Lime.

We talk about how they pivoted their company, built their own blockchain and hardwire devices from scratch attracting investment from Google Ventures, Khosala Ventures Munich Re and Mark Beinhoff personally.

We explore crossing the 'crypto chasm', enabling hundreds of billions of dollars to flow from CeFi to DeFi by solving the problem of ‘The 3 Cs’: Capital, Connectivity and Control. We look at the pragmatic approach of Alkemi's cofounders, who describe their team as the living embodiment of the yin and yang required to understand, communicate and serve the needs of CeFi whilst innovating at the edge of DeFi.

We discuss their conservative steps towards providing sustainable yields whilst solving for the counter-party risk required by regulated entities.

We discuss with Alex Atallah, founder and CTO of OpenSea, how the NFT market has evolved as an asset class over the last couple of years, and its various segments from art (which he believes is the ‘reference app’ for NFTs) to collectibles, virtual land and social tokens to the debates around on-chain metadata and decentralisation and its trade-offs.

We explore how NFTs are becoming increasingly more multimedia in form, experiential and how this new medium like, MTV or TikTok, could inform the creative format, and industries at large.