The Rollup

The evolution of stablecoins has been a mighty topic of discussion as the crypto markets recover from the Black Swan that was LUNA/UST. We’re always interested to see how mass carnage can further push innovation in breaking edge tech. Pushing forward we will see risk managed by protocols & DAOs, a deeper level of due diligence and better projects built! We are currently seeing the development...

The multichain ecosystem is expanding w great speed and innovation. Bridge infrastructure from one chain to another is lacking sufficient liquidity and connectivity to effectively keep pace with the innovations on new chains. Enter, Router Protocol. Router protocol is building a web of communication relayers to streamline the bridging infrastructure and bring cross-chain efficiency to the DeFi wor...

The winners and losers of DeFi are separated in the trenches. As market cycles shift, we are starting to see massive opportunities for growth as market cycles turn towards a new frontier. After an initial foray in Web1, Dave Levine has been OG gem hunter in DeFi since the early days of blockchain. Fast forward a few years and Dave is hunting yield on various protocols across several chains. In thi...

Stablecoin wars are here and they are in full force. The best yields in DeFi, the strongest designs, and everything in between. One of the OG stable coins in DeFi that has never had a 1% peg movement and has a considerable advantage over others in terms of Lindy effect (basically, its been around longer than some of the newer ones/has a better track record) is $FRAX. Frax Finance is a fractional r...

The return of veTokenomics is on the rise with new DEXs in DeFi. The idea behind vote locking is a novel, complex mechanism which attempts to build a longer term value proposition to the token holders of that token. The initial introduction to this was CRV & veCRV, which has been the staple of yield in DeFi. In this episode of DeFi By Design, we chat with Andrea Cianfruglia & Alan Stivelma...

Rememeber when society was racing to see who could get to the moon first? The most important tech ‘space race’ of our century is of decentralized technologies, led of course by Ethereum. We are in the midst of the largest combined force the Ethereum community has ever seen: The first objective being a successful merge, and the second being scaling via layer 2s. With the biggest L2 in the ecosystem...

Welcome to the future of tickets and events, web3 style. Say goodbye to scalpers, crazy price increases, and absurd lines and welcome in a new way of obtaining a relationship with your favorite communities. The middlemen involved in the events businesses take a big cut from you for themselves while providing zero sense of community. Introducing: Token Events! A project meant to revolutionize the t...

In today’s installment of the podcast, we are having a chat with Weso who is in charge of strategic partnerships and development at Beefy Finance. We discuss chasing yield, going multi-chain and constantly evolving in the DeFi world. Weso also helps us understand how Beefy fits with other projects: from optimizing yield on DEXes to making self-repaying loans possible on lending protocols. What mak...

In today’s episode of a podcast, we talk about the future of DeFi and Bitcoin with the Palo Alto Councilman, US Congress Candidate and tech entrepreneur Greg Tanaka. He helps us understand the implications of the Infrastructure Bill and the most recent Executive Order for cryptocurrencies. We cover why we no longer need government control over money and why distortions in the money supply such as...

2022 is all about the layer 2s and MetisDAO has a huge head start against the other rollups with their launched token and native project deployment happening rapidly. We are going all in Layer 2s this year. What a way to kick it off by speaking with the founder of MetisDAO, Elena, who is an outspoken, wise woman building in DeFi! We touched on the different types of rollups, possible functionaliti...

With subnets on the horizon, and an abundance of projects set to launch, 2022 is going to be an exciting year for Avalanche. However, one of the main issues that projects face is that of low liquidity. Today we got to sit down and chat with Ken Burbary, Chief Marketing Officer and Andrew Cooper, Digital Marketing Officer at Pangolin, a Decentralized Exchange on Avalanche that seeks to address the...

It’s exciting to see how the multi-chain world is shaping up for 2022. As various chains gain more traction and user activity, the ability to perform cross-chain swaps is going to be an absolute must. Today we got to chat with Philip Zentner, the CEO and Co-Founder of Li(nked).Finance (Li. Finance), a protocol that seeks to interconnect the most crucial parts of DeFi, namely DEXes and Bridges to c...

As Decentralized Finance continues to progress, we’re beginning to see more DeFi primitives pop up in the form of structured products. One of these are fixed rates, a primitive that exists on TradFi that is starting to be explored in DeFi. With yield becoming harder to find, fixed-rate products offer the ability to turn risk assets into guaranteed yield generating assets. Today we talked with Tedd...

Despite the advancements in the DeFi sector, cases of flash loans, rugpulls, private key hacks and smart contract vulnerabilities continue to increase. Despite DeFi insurance protocols having been in the space since 2020, the model still has ways to go as collateralizing risk and offering coverage isn’t as simple as it seems. Today we talked with Dan Thomson the CMO of InsurAce, one of the fastest...

We truly believe the future of finance (and France!) is DeFi and what we are seeing built now in Web3. Its truly exciting and captivating at the same time, the Wild Wild West. The problem right now is the products we have built are insanely tough to use and interact with. We are seeing massive growth and we need to onboard the bigger part of the market, the boomers. We will do this with the help o...

The DEX space has seen a lot of changes since DeFi Summer. A lot of positive ones and some interesting experiments for sure. An OG in the DeFi space is Bancor who are working on their V3 protocol. Now, in this podcast we don't talk just about Bancor, we go over DEX tokenomics, the creation of proper emissions and inflation schedules, and how overall DeFi as a whole can create long-term sustain...

Scaling has often been a major pain point of Ethereum, the largest smart contract platform. However, the future is going to be a hotbed of innovation as Layer 2 scaling solutions such as Arbitrum, Optimism, Metis and Boba have been on the rise. Today we sat down and caught up with Jagdeep Sidhu, a core developer for Syscoin and Bradley Stephenson, a Syscoin Foundation Board Member. We discussed Sy...

The deployment of various scaling solutions has brought us an inch closer to on boarding the next wave of users to Ethereum. Today, we spoke with Will Harborne, an Ethereum OG whose worked on scaling Ethereum for years & also the Founder of DeversiFi, a layer 2 hub for DeFi built on top of StarkX, that allows users to trade, send funds, borrow & lend all without paying gas costs from your...

In the past couple of months, there’s been an explosion of DeFi projects. However, integrations between protocols are lacking and the current set of financial instruments are relatively simple compared to what we see in TradFi. One of these include, variable interest rates. Today, we got to talk to QiDao, one of the newer DeFi primitives that introduces fixed interest rates. Compared to variable i...

Lending & Borrowing has always been the very roots of Decentralized Finance. Combined with a multichain world and the numerous protocols to generate yield from, tracking and managing all these positions can be a pain, especially during volatile periods. Today we talked with Nikola Jankovic, an Ethereum OG and the Community Manager of DeFi Saver, an advanced one-stop management dashboard for cr...

As you know, there is a flock of capital coming into Web3 at an astounding pace. This is coming from institutions, high networth individuals, retail and more. Why? Because of the VIBES. Legit, web3 has been so much fun lately and everyone can see it. In this episode, we speak with serial internet entrepreneur Taylor Welch who is known for his online marketing empire. He is now absolutely enthralle...

It is no doubt that the crypto space has been growing at a tremendous rate this year with DeFi at the center of it all. Today we get to hear from Evgeny, the Co-Founder of Zerion, a platform that first started as a portfolio tracker and has since expanded to support numerous protocols and over a hundred thousand tokens. Currently, Zerion is one of the most used mobile applications allowing crypto...

NFTs continue to bask in the limelight with Twitter recently announcing its plan to allow users to showcase their NFTs on their profile and TikTok’s move towards launching its first ever NFT collection. These altogether have contributed to the massive inflow of users into crypto NFT space. Today, Andy and Rob interview Deeze, a crypto trader turned NFT trader turned community manager for Fractiona...

DAOs have been a hot topic as of late. As more people pour into the crypto space and learn how Web 3.0 works, the more users there are that begin to explore, contribute and even create DAOs of their own. Today, Andy and Rob interview Spencer Graham, product manager for DAOHaus, a platform that facilitates individual DAOs and supercharges what they can accomplish by creating a supportive ecosystem...

2021 has really been the year of cross-chain solutions. Amongst all the chain-specific liquidity mining incentive programs, few seem to realize that there is one chain in particular whose ecosystem is far bigger than most realize and has been influential in the creation of most of the chains we know now. Today, Andy and Rob interview Peng Zhong, the CEO of Tendermint, a core contributor to the Cos...