Base Layer

Marco joins us on Base Layer and it's a great episode! He started Genesis Group 7 years ago to focus on Bitcoin mining and has seen the evolution through very unique perspective. We discuss some big topics including the recent hash rate decline and why that happened (and provide some great analogies for people to understand it) and also discussed the halving which is happening in about 40 days; what the implications are for the entire space. We also discussed COVID19 and Bitcoin and what it means to be working in this industry during a global pandemic. 

Rene, the co-founder of Celo joins me on Base Layer to discuss a multitude of topics including: plans to create finance solutions for the 5.6 billion smartphone owners around the world; the importance of Celo to be utilized for cross border payments and the Alliance for Prosperity and how it’s different from Libra. We also had a significant conversation about how the digital dollar can be used to distribute the government’s stimulus and the effect that COVID-19 is having on Celo.

Dan joins us on Base Layer to give an amazing overview of the global macro environment as it relates to COVID-19, $2T economic packages, $1T in daily repo markets, Bitcoin, Gold and much more. Dan is a veteran Global Macro investor and a co-founder of GBI. In his 20 year career, he has worked as a portfolio manager and analyst with a number of well-known investors such as Stan Druckenmiller (Duquesne Capital), Michael Steinhardt (Steinhardt Capital), Julian Robertson (Tiger Management), Steve Cohen (SAC Capital), and Lord Rothschild (RIT Capital). Dan shares his thoughts daily on Twitter @DTAPCAP 

An incredibly important episode with Mark Yusko, CEO and CIO at Morgan Creek about the current macro market landscape on what has shown to be a historic day. With the VIX near 2008 levels, with WTI around $30/barrel, with new travel restrictions and a global pandemic causing havoc on the supply chains of the world and now the demand side, this is stuff you'll be reading about in textbooks in a decade. Listen & pay attention. 

The amazing Catherine Coley joins me on Base Layer to discuss the move from traditional finance, being on an fx trading desk and seeing the carnage in traditional markets, and relating it to the growth of digital assets. We also talk about International Women's Month, her experience as a woman and CEO and the work we all need to do to exponentially increase the financial inclusion of others into digital assets. 

Matt joins me back on Base Layer to do a thorough explanation of tBTC. The goal of TBTC is to create a trustless system for using Bitcoin on Ethereum-based systems and could be seen as critical infrastructure for the success of the broader ecosystem. The goal of tBTC is the creation an ERC-20 token that maintains the most important property of Bitcoin — its status as “hard money” … The ability to trade scrip for its backing deposit freely is what distinguishes a backed currency from fiat money. The supply of tBTC is always backed by an equal number of reserved BTC. This means for every token in circulation, 1 BTC has been removed from circulation.” This is such an interesting project - one to listen to! 

Rebecca joins me on Base Layer for one of my first discussions on the legal landscape of digital assets. We discuss a range of current cases and issues revolving around Ripple, Telegram and Kik. We also discuss the recent issues with the Wilshire ETF proposal which was denied by the SEC and the ongoing case surrounding Ifinex / Tether. Rebecca is an amazing practitioner and someone who I've had speak on legal issues in digital assets at my FO256 summits prior. Not to be missed! 

Dan from HXRO joins Base Layer and it's a great one! Hxro is a cryptocurrency platform that offers perpetual, time-based digital derivatives products. Hxro offers a simplified way to interact with the market, giving traders an alternative way to express a view on price, hedge risk and trade digital assets. Hxro has taken inspiration from legacy financial markets and merged it with social gaming layers to provide users with an innovative alternative to trading crypto assets. One of Hxro’s unique attributes is that its core products are parimutuel - a system that aggregates all positions into a liquidity pool with in-the-money positions sharing the pool at expiration. This creates a new dimension of fairness and payoff possibilities for our user base. Check it out and pass it around! 

Evan joins us to discuss Ampleforth and the Ample; the Ample is a commodity-money, like Bitcoin or gold, but with near-perfect supply elasticity, like fiat. It is the first sound money with elastic supply. Evan discusses their opinion that scarce commodity-monies like gold and silver are naturally fair and independent. They are immune to runaway inflation, but cannot efficiently respond to changes in demand—making them vulnerable to economic shocks and runaway deflation. To address this shortcoming, the project's founders designed a synthetic commodity-money that propagates price-information into supply, much like how thermal expansion propagates nearby kinetic energy into a material’s volume in the natural world.

Sam joins us on Base Layer to tell us what FTX is and why many people are talking about it. A piece of news that came out after the show recording was that FTX was in the middle of a raise at unicorn status valuation, so for those trying to understand more about FTX and what it does this is a good initial primer. We talk about their three tiered liquidation model, how it's similar in some ways to the '08-'09 financial crisis idea of a "bad bank", we talk about the "Trump token" and how this new market on FTX is different than prediction markets like Augur and much more. 

Simon joins us on Base Layer to discuss the very important work he and Valiu are doing creating opportunities for people to send and receive money internationally, especially in areas hit by hyperinflation like Venezuela. A lot of people talk about Bitcoin and crypto in Venezuela but executing effective platforms to really help haven't been seen, until now. Their goal is to build trust with their customers through a simple and transparent remittances platform designed for their customer’s financial needs. Utilizing a blockchain platform and an expansive network of locations for customers to deposit and receive cash, Valiu is disrupting the international currency transfer market in Latin America. This is one to definitely listen in to! 

Muneeb comes back to Base Layer to talk all about version 2.0 of Blockstack's Stacks blockchain coming out because there's a significant change: miners on the network will need to post BTC to mine a block. That BTC will then get shared with nodes maintaining a copy of the ledger. Muneeb and I talk about how the team acknowledges bitcoin as the most secure blockchain in the world and why. Come listen and learn all about Proof of Transfer and what the implications are. 

What an episode with Jack from Skale! The SKALE Network has been designed with the goal of resolving the technical scalability, user experience, and cost issues affiliated with decentralized networks such as Ethereum. We discuss transactions per second and the appropriate measures for evaluating throughput; we talk technicals in terms of using side chains, sharding and much more. We talk about the 35 dApp's in their Innovator program, from DeFi to real estate and much in between. And in terms of important news we talk about this headline: "Blockchain scaling network SKALE chosen as launch partner for ConsenSys Codefi's Activate token platform", why that happened and the implications for Skale. Amazing episode! 

Leighton joins Base Layer to discuss one of the most talked about projects, PoolTogether which is a no loss lottery built on Ethereum. Their mission is to create financial security by offering a healthy alternative to lotteries. PoolTogether is based on the proven concept known as “No Loss Lotteries” or “Prize Linked Savings Accounts”. These products have been shown to divert money from traditional lotteries and increase savings. We talk about how this all works, from using smart contracts to stablecoins and the dramatic growth Leighton and the PoolTogether team have seen in the last few months. 

Loi joins us on Base Layer for a full breakdown on Kyber Network and it's a really good one! Kyber is an on-chain liquidity protocol that aggregates liquidity from a wide range of reserves, powering instant and secure token exchange in any decentralized application. We make some analogies to traditional finance like the power of what Bloomberg Terminals would provide, we talk a lot about atomicity, wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) and a host of other narratives. Not one to miss! 

Joe joins us on Base Layer and it's an amazing episode which highlights how important I think Bison Trails is in the overall development and maturation of digital assets and distributed & decentralized platforms. Joe talks about his past before BT and then we launch into how they are creating an interoperability platform that allows one to plug & plug different protocols for file storage, video, search and much more into a more unified operator. We talk about how Bison Trails is also working to minimize slashing of stake in PoS systems and their work with Libra. Don't miss this and pass it around!! 

Jeremy joins us on Base Layer and it's a great conversation about everything from his early days in technology and seeing the diffusion of innovation and the curve of adoption; we talk about Web 1.0 to Web 3.0, about stablecoins and USDC, his work with policy makers and politicians to educate them on digital assets, especially during the Libra testimony and so much more. 

Kevin joins us on Base Layer to give us a great breakdown on Ava Labs! AVA's mission is to democratize financial markets and bridges all blockchain platforms together into one interoperable ecosystem; they provide the ability to build your own custom blockchains or to digitize any assets with arbitrarily complex rulesets. Kevin discusses the different consensus algo's from Nakamoto, Classical to Avalanche, their own consensus algo. They tout the ability to get to 5000 transactions per second (TPS) so we discuss how, the use of DAG's and how they could fit in the climate focused investors toolkit these days. 

Stani joins us on Base Layer to discuss Aave - a project that everyone seems to be talking about right now. Aave is an Open Source and Non-Custodial protocol to earn interest on deposits & borrow assets and has emerged in the DeFi space as a player. We discuss this move from matching lenders & borrowers in digital assets to pooling assets; we discuss the collateral and different digital asset Aave is working with. More importantly we also discuss the underwriting of those different digital assets, the scoring methodologies and why they are working with Chainlink with their smart contract and oracles who main the lending pools. So much in this one...

Jalak joins us on Base Layer and it's an amazing discussion with an investor who has been active in the digital asset/blockchain world for over 6 years. We discuss the changing narratives from the early days to now, the geographic niche's of certain projects like Bitpesa vs what it takes for global adoption, Libra and DCEP as big stories of 2019 and the work she's doing with local politicians in NYC to make a "public Venmo" and much more.