Web3 Galaxy Brain 🌌🧠

My guests today are Nick Hollins and Ivano Salonia, co-founders of UFO. UFO is an onchain radio network and a spiritual offspring of indie radio.

In this episode, Nick, Ivano, and I discuss the work of creating podcasts that grow onchain brands and build community. We consider how Web3 communities make use of Web2, how NFT drops create momentum, and how media consumption habits have changed in the last few years.

It was great getting to know Nick and Ivano who are exploring what's possible at the intersection of indie subcultures and the Ethereum ecosystem. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

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My guests today are Bryce Ferguson and Jack Kearney, CEO and CTO of Turnkey.

Turnkey is a private key as a service provider designed to let app devs and enterprise customers create, manage, and use private keys with a simple API. Turnkey leverages Amazon Nitro, a Trusted Execution Environment as a service, to give customers of all sizes a Secure Enclave in the cloud. This is particularly useful for companies that need to programmatically manage a large volume of private keys.

On this episode, Bryce and Jack explain Turnkey's QuorumOS, a deterministic OS for secure execution of apps like their Policy Engine, Signer, and EVM Parser. We also discuss the provisioning process for initializing apps securely, and discuss the risk profile of Hardware Security Modules and HSM cloud providers like Amazon.

It was a pleasure chatting with Bryce and Jack and learning more about the wonderful world of cryptography in the cloud. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

My guest today is Bunny, aka @ConejoCapital, CEO of Dora. Dora is a user friendly block explorer and blockchain search engine.

On this episode, Bunny and I discuss multichain block explorers, unified blockchain interaction interfaces, and the challenges of blockchain indexing. We discuss Dora's search product and it's data product, and it's adventures beyond the EVM.

It was fun getting to know Bunny and learn about Dora's journey making blockchain transaction auditing easier for consumers. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

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My guest today is Derek Chiang, CEO of ZeroDev. ZeroDev is a smart account provider whose SDK makes it easy for app devs to integrate social authentication, Passkey signers, paymaster gas sponsorships, transaction bundling, and third party plugins.

In this conversation, Derek and I discuss 4337 in depth from the perspective of the app dev. We talk about the difference between wallet signer providers and smart contract account providers, how to choose between the many smart account implementations, and which transactions to sponsor. Derek also shares some alpha about an upcoming product that will synchronize smart account state across chains.

It was a pleasure talking to Derek in this wide ranging and detailed conversation about 4337 in practice. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

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Chapters

(00:00:00) Intro

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Today's episode is a roundtable discussion about EIP-3074: AUTH and AUTHCALL and EIP-4337: Account Abstraction Using Alt Mempool, two very different approaches to enabling smart contract accounts.

To discuss the past, present, and future of 3074 and 4337, I'm joined by Matt Garnett, aka lightclients, developer contributor working on Go Ethereum, Gregory Markou, aka @gregthegreek, CTO at ChainSafe, and Joseph Delong, CTO at Astaria and former CTO at Sushi.

It was fantastic getting these three talented and opinionated developers to the table to discuss the social and technical processes it takes to improve the EVM. My thanks to Pedro Gomes for helping bring this episode together. I hope you enjoy the show.

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My guest today is Biconomy co-founder and CEO Ahmed Al-Balaghi. Since 2019, Biconomy has executed over 40 million metatransactions to help devs make crypto UX easier for their users. Today, Biconomy is one of the top Account Abstraction service providers, boasting significant markeshare across popular EVM chains.

In this episode, Ahmed and I sit down to discuss Biconomy's ERC-4337 smart accounts, Paymasters, and Bundlers as a service. We cover session keys, Passkey signers, EIP-7212, multichain permissions. We also touch on ERC-6900 AA Module, which Biconomy and Rhinestone are collaborating on for their forthcoming Module Store, which is planned to launch in Q1 2024.

It was a pleasure chatting with Ahmed about his journey building Biconomy into one of the most important players in the AA ecosystem. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

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Chapters

(00:00:00) Intro

Web3 Galaxy Brain on Gitcoin

My guests today are Jacob Frantz and Zak Salmon, founders of FirstMate.

FirstMate lets Creators build and host their own secondary NFT marketplaces. Creator-owned marketplaces can display all of an artist or team's collections across minting platforms, enforce royalties, and source liquidity from the most popular marketplaces thanks to Reservoir. In its initial version, FirstMate is served as an app within the Manifold app store, and it will become its own website soon.

On this episode, Jacob, Zak and I discuss the evolving NFT landscape, what it's like running the most popular Reddit Collectible Avatars secondary marketplace, and how FirstMate works under the hood. If you're interested in the art and business of NFTs, this episode is for you.

It was a pleasure chatting with Jacob and Zak who are insightful, kind, and persistent. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

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Chapters

(00:00:00) Intro

(00:01:42) Interview start

(00:03:00) Every Artist Deserves To Own Their Marketplace

(00:11:00) The New FirstMate Manifold app

(00:16:00) Creators and NFTs

(00:22:30) Creator Insights

(00:24:15) Reservoir vs FirstMate

(00:25:33) Having everyone in one place

(00:33:00) Reddit Collectible Avatars

(00:40:00) Indexing Shared Contracts

(00:44:00) Creator Owned Primary Storefronts

(00:44:30) Creator Storefronts Are For Communication

(00:45:00) Background at Instagram and Walmart

(00:47:40) Metrics

(00:57:00) The Royalty Wars

(01:11:00) Sound’s secondary market

(01:13:15) 90cc’s secondary market

(01:18:00) Bankless’s secondary market

(01:24:00) How FirstMate is built

(01:36:00) NFTs Enable Niche Creator Monetization

(01:41:00) What comes after NFTs?

(01:47:30) New-To-Crypto Creators

(01:55:00) Scarcity

(01:56:15) Outro

My guest today is Nitya Subramanian, founder of Capsule.

Capsule is an embedded wallet SDK that leverages Passkeys, MPC, and AA Smart Accounts to simplify the user experience around wallet creation and transaction signing. Apps that integrate Capsule's embedded wallet SDK authenticate users by their email address. Capsule creates a Passkey for each user, which is configured as a signer on a 2/2 Multi-Party Computation. This MPC, in turn, is the signer on a 4337 smart account. Users that have created a Capsule account in another app will be able to access it in any future app they log into with the same email address. In other words, Capsule is a cross-domain embedded wallet provider.

In this conversation, Nitya explains the MPC setup underlying Capsule, and provides hints at the team's forthcoming release, which aims to allow secure cross-app smart account access, programmable MPC permissions, and automations for common actions like Dollar Cost Averaging.

It was great talking to Nitya about Capsule, which is making strides in the challenging domain of cross-app embedded wallets for a mainstream audience. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

My guest today is Furqan Rydhan, co-founder of Thirdweb.

Thirdweb is a popular web3 toolkit for app developers. Thirdweb is used by big brands and indie developers to drop NFTs, enable log-in, and power decentralized games. By the numbers, in September 2023, Thirdweb had 50,000 active developers and 5 million active end-users interacting with products built atop its tools.

In this conversation, Furqan and I discuss Thirdweb's focus on app developers, and how that differentiates it from its peers. We dive into how he thinks about organizing its vast set of product offerings, and what he's learned after many years building and exiting unicorns like Bebo and AppLovin. We also talk about working with Thirdweb co-founder Steven Bartlett, and the content marketing approach he brought to the project. Finally, we touch on Furqan's venture studio, Founders Inc.

It was a pleasure chatting with Furqan whose years of experience lend him a mature perspective on startup cycles and the development of web infrastructure. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

My guests today are DC Posch and Nalin Bhardwaj, co-founders of Daimo. Daimo is a stablecoin focused iOS wallet built with Passkeys and AA Smart Accounts.

Chapters

(00:00:00) Intro

(00:01:37) How DC and Nalin met: EthUniversity and Hack Lodge (00:03:40) Decentralization and permissionlessness

(00:05:57) What is Daimo

(00:08:30) Advantages of Smart Contract Accounts

(00:12:55) Passkeys and Enclave Keys

(00:16:25) Trusted execution environments and firmware updates (00:19:55) Apple binaries and reproducible APKs

(00:24:30) Self-custody UX

(00:25:58) Why p256 (secp256r1)?

(00:28:20) ECDSA vs ZK

(00:31:10) Renaud Dubois & FreshCryptoLib’s p256 implementation vs Daimo’s p256Verifier

(00:36:50) Wycheproof test vectors

(00:38:00) CPU style optimization for EVM cryptography (00:39:40) Precomputation, or not

(00:44:10) EIP-7212

(00:49:05) Progressive Precompiles (aka Precompile shadowing) (00:54:00) EVM equivalence and p256

(01:00:05) Veridise audit

(01:02:00) Daimo's forthcoming Base64 encoder

(01:03:40) Daimo cross-chain stablecoin wallets

(01:06:00) Getting Daimo