Base Layer

Michael joins us to discuss Star Atlas, one of the most talked-about P2E, blockchain-based games coming to market. Star Atlas is a virtual gaming metaverse based in the year 2620. The metaverse introduces a unique gaming experience through the combination of both traditional core game and blockchain mechanics, which Michael discusses along the journey of building the game. Building games is challenging in conventional markets; making a play-to-earn game is even more difficult. Learn why so many are talking about this.

Pat White and Amy Kalnoki join me for a special Base Layer episode as we discuss Bitwave, a tax and accounting platform that digital asset projects are flocking to. Why? Bitwave has developed special tools to focus specifically on the implications of DeFi activity like staking, yield farming, and more. Bitwave is the first investment in our new venture fund, Endeavor, and we discuss why we invested in the team, the total addressable market, the tools they've built, and much more. To learn more about Bitwave you can go here.

Today, a big show highlights some work we have done at Arca, the firm I have helped build over the last three years. Rayne Steinberg, our CEO, joins me on the show today to navigate the news we are dropping and what it entails for the future. Fascinating stuff - I can't wait for you all to listen!

Scott, the CEO of Candy Digital, recently came on Base Layer to talk about building one of the most interesting NFT based sports collections to date. The world learned about sports NFT's via NBA Top Shot, but what Candy is building is different - adding experiences like throwing out the first pitch or being able to meet the players of the team you love, all by buying a special NFT they create. Learn more about Scott and what they are doing at Candy - if you love sports as I do, this is one for you.

Ahmed joins me on the show for a great discussion on the build-out of Biconomy, a project I was lucky enough to know about in the earliest of days. Today, Biconomy seeks to accelerate web3.0 adoption by making all its components more composable, interoperable & usable. Tomorrow, Biconomy is the foundation of how transactions and chain interaction take place seamlessly and frictionlessly. Listen in on how they are doing this and learn about next-gen tooling for Web 3.0.

Zach joins me on the show to talk about his road to helping build Mintable, a marketplace where people can find, sell and mint their own NFT's. We talk about the "mom experiment" -- creating a user interface that eliminates some of the technical complexities so more people outside the box could enjoy participating in this new world. We also talk about gaming and the idea that all IP will eventually be an NFT. Super interesting conversation with what we call an OG.

Sebastien, the co-founder of The Sandbox, joins me for a must-listen on the state of blockchain-based gaming. Over the past two years, this industry has seen exponential growth, from daily active users (DAU's) of some games eclipsing 1 million players to new metaverses that should make any diehard Minecraft or Roblox player take a look. Listen to a pioneer in the space and hear what's happening here.

Base Layer is back with Alex Svanenik from Nansen, a research platform used by professional investors in Digital Assets. With Nansen you can see where funds are moving to, identify new projects or tokens, and trace transactions down to the most granular level. Listen in on the three-year journey to build this platform and where it's going in the future.

Derek joins me on the show to talk all about Moonbeam which is a blockchain project built back in January 2020 as a way to tackle cross-chain interoperability challenges, it is an Ethereum compatible smart contract parachain (and we discuss what that means) on Polkadot. For those who are not familiar with Polkadot, it is a multi-blockchain platform where projects can have their own blockchain designed to meet their specific needs rather than use a general-purpose blockchain that might not have all they need. 

Founded in 2014, Bitso, the Mexico City-based company offers multiple cryptocurrency products and services to more than 2 million customers across Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil. Pablo Gonzalez, the Co-Founder of Bitso joins me to discuss their offering which includes: the Bitso App which lets users buy, sell, send, or receive bitcoin and 8 other cryptocurrencies; Bitso Alpha, a professional-grade crypto trading platform; and Bitso Business, a suite of cross-border products for local enterprises. Recently the company raised a $250M Series C led by Coatue and Tiger Global, two prominent funds in the world; we learn why in this episode.

Gabby joins me for one of the most inspiring conversations I've had on the show to date. In late 2020, Yield Guild Games set out on a mission to introduce as many people as possible to the concept of play-to-earn. Just eight months later, they have witnessed countless life-changing success stories as a result of the money earned by playing NFT games such as Axie Infinity. Come listen to the story and see how digital assets are changing people's lives for the better around the world.

What a special show with 0xMaki, a world-renown contributor to SushiSwap which is a decentralized exchange built on Ethereum that utilizes an automated market-making system rather than a traditional order-book. Instead of matching individual buy and sell orders, users can pool together two assets that are then traded against, with the price determined based on the ratio between the two. SushiSwap began as a fork of Uniswap; however, is growing into a more diversified, more grassroots alternative.

Colin from Protocol Labs joins me to discuss all the work they are doing there in enabling Web 3.0. Protocol Labs is an open-source research, development, and deployment laboratory. Their projects include IPFS, Filecoin, libp2p, and many more. They aim to make human existence orders of magnitude better through technology.  About our sponsors: Nexo and Paraswap Nexo Try Nexo, the only instant, efficient and complete crypto banking service, featuring: savings accounts with up to 12% interest on crypto, Stablecoins & fiat; flexible crypto-backed credit lines at just 5.9% APR; an exchange with 75+ crypto and fiat pairs and top prices. All of this and more wrapped up in a single Nexo Wallet. Start banking at nexo.io Paraswap Paraswap aggregates decentralized exchanges and other DeFi services in one comprehensive interface to streamline and facilitate users' interactions with Ethereum's decentralized finance. Learn more at paraswap.io  

Sergey joins me on the show again to discuss their new 2.0 whitepaper in which they delve into hybrid smart contracts and how those go beyond smart contracts today. We talk about the technical advancements outlined in the paper and how Chainlink oracle networks abstract complexity away from existing enterprises that want to interact with smart contracts. We also discuss how Chainlink work not only within the Ethereum ecosystem but with others chains and L2's.

Greg joins us today for a fantastic episode of Base Layer discussing Akash Network. Akash is the world’s first decentralized cloud computing marketplace, leveraging 85% of underutilized cloud capacity in 8.4 million data centers. Akash enables anyone to buy and sell unused compute. Akash DeCloud greatly accelerates scale and price performance for DeFi, decentralized organizations, and high-growth industries like machine learning/AI. About our sponsors: Nexo: Try Next - the only instant, efficient and complete crypto banking service, featuring: Savings accounts with up to 12% interest on crypto, Stablecoins & fiat; flexible crypto-backed credit lines at just 5.9% APR; an exchange with 75+ crypto and fiat pairs and top prices. All of this and more wrapped up in a single Nexo Wallet. Start banking at nexo.io Paraswap: ParaSwap aggregates decentralized exchanges and other DeFi services in one comprehensive interface to streamline and facilitate users' interactions with Ethereum's decentralized finance. Learn mo

Do joins me on Base Layer for a epic chat. Terra is a permissionless blockchain network that is based on a suite of fiat-pegged stablecoins collateralized by the network’s native token LUNA. The idea at Terra is that the path to widespread adoption of Digital Assets is largely based on stability and composability of the underlying network, which is what Terra excels at -- providing a fast and secure settlement layer for building financial applications on top of. These applications can range from payments (Chai) to investing (Mirror) and savings (Anchor). 

Financial systems rarely connect to one another directly across company boundaries. Business networks are in competition for market share and thus, do not have incentives to share user profiles, build a robust and shareable reputation system within a network, or open their data silos to others. Lucas and his team at Centrifuge believe that the time of incremental optimization of archaic processes has to come to an end. Only by collectively shaping an entirely new system for the global financial supply chain can we foster widespread economic opportunity. This new system can only be established by dismantling the existing financial supply chain infrastructure, stripping it down to its essential components, and reassembling it for the 21st century. Come listen a fascinating episode that discusses bridging these divides.

Ganesh from Covalent joins me with a great discussion on Covalent which provides a unified API to bring full transparency and visibility to assets across all blockchain networks. Simply put, they have a single API which allows you to pull detailed, granular blockchain transaction data from multiple blockchains with no code.  About our sponsors: Coinbase Coinbase Prime is one of the leading prime brokerages for digital assets. Coinbase provides the bridge to the crypto world for institutional investors, high net worth individuals, and financial institutions. Through their professional trading platform, deep and diversified liquidity, and Coinbase Custody, Coinbase Prime is built for institutions. Learn more at prime.coinbase.com. Nexo Try Nexo - the only instant, efficient and complete crypto banking service, featuring: Saving accounts with up to 12% interest in crypto, stablecoins & fiat Flexible crypto-backed credit lines at just 5.9% APR An exchange with 75+ crypto and fiat pairs and top prices All

Such a fun and interesting episode! Aavegotchis are rare crypto-collectibles living on the Ethereum blockchain, backed by the ERC721 standard used in popular blockchain games such as Cryptokitties, Axie Infinity, and Cryptovoxels. We talk about the game play and what's under the hood which includes some very sophisticated DeFi tooling.

Compass is a bitcoin-first company on a mission to support the decentralized growth of hashrate and strengthen network security by helping more people, learn, explore and mine bitcoin. They have made it incredibly easy to start Bitcoin mining - something many have wanted to explore. We discuss this, the environmental fud that has been prominent lately and much more.