Unchained

Gabriel Abed, founder of Bitt.com and Vice President of the board of directors, describes how he went from mining Bitcoin to persuading governors of central banks to not quash Bitt's goal to create central bank digital currencies in the Caribbean and getting the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank to pilot one starting next year. He tells the tale of how Overstock came to invest in Bitt, how he brought...

Luis Buenaventura, founder of Bloom Solutions, and Leo Weese, president of Bitcoin Association of Hong Kong, discuss the crypto scene in Asia — how it differs from that of the West, and how it differs within the region. We also cover the regulatory climate there, how Korean traders occasionally stuff their pockets with cash and hop flights to Hong Kong, and whether the Hong Kong protests have had...

In recent years, the Human Rights Foundation and Alex Gladstein, its chief strategy officer, have become forces in the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency community. In this episode, he discusses why Bitcoin is important for human rights, its three most important characteristics, and why Facebook's Libra project should be helpful to the adoption of the technology, at least in the short-term. He also descri...

Tarun Chitra, cofounder and CEO of Gauntlet, describes how his company enables crypto teams to run through simulations to see how their design choices will affect the project once it is trading. Using the cofounders' background in quantitative finance and high-frequency trading, Gauntlet uses tools from behavioral economics as well as game theory, plus real-world information such as exchange data...

In this panel, recorded at the Oslo Freedom Forum 2019, I moderated what an attendee described as a "lively" discussion on the relationship between finances and freedom with Bitcoin author and educator Jimmy Song; Alena Vranova, Head of Strategy at Casa; and Coin Center founder Jerry Brito. We talked about what it's like to live under a regime where people don’t have a lot of financial freedom, ho...

Peter Smith, the CEO of Blockchain, discusses how the company got started, why the company is focused on users owning their own private keys and how that is what enables all the most interesting applications of blockchain technology. He talks about the full range of customers and markets they serve, their lending business and their dark pool. We also discuss regulation, SegWit, nation-states getti...

Ted Livingston, CEO of Kik and the founder of the Kin Foundation, and Patrick Gibbs, partner at Cooley, announce the formation of the $5 million DefendCrypto.org fund at Coinbase Custody to fight the SEC in court. Kik and Kin are hoping that a lawsuit would eventually result in a new Howey test for crypto tokens, to determine which ones are a security. In this episode, they explain has happened so...

Sharon Goldberg, CEO of Arwen and Boston University computer science professor, describes how the protocol enables people to trade on crypto exchanges without making their coins vulnerable to exchange hacks, how this differs from trading on a decentralized exchange, and how Arwen would function if the exchange you were using on was hacked during a trade. She also discusses how Arwen works with any...

Jutta Steiner, CEO of Parity, and Gavin Wood, who goes by the title "chief white space officer," describe the network Parity plans to launch later this year, Polkadot, how it aims to solve scalability, interoperability and security and when a developer would choose to build a dapp on Ethereum vs. a parachain on Polkadot. We also discuss another one of their products, Substrate, which enables devel...

Jennifer Campbell and Kevin Johnson, cofounder and COO, respectively, of Tagomi, describe how Tagomi helps institutional players make larger crypto trades more efficiently and at the best price possible, plus analyze how that was executed. They contrast it with the pre-Tagomi process for doing large crypto trades, how their software, which functions as a sort of "Kayak.com" for crypto trading, wor...

Jae Kwon, founder and CEO of Tendermint and president of the Interchain Foundation, and Ethan Buchman, cofounder of Tendermint and Cosmos and technical director of the Interchain Foundation, discuss the various technologies that form the Cosmos/Tendermint system. When the Cosmos network launched on March 13, it was built on what is the blockchain equivalent of an operating system, a consensus algo...

Charlie Lee, the creator of Litecoin and aka SatoshiLite, discusses how he came to launch Litecoin, how the "fair" launch may have helped its success, why he didn't work on it for a stretch, and what inspired him to devote all of his time to it — but not own any litecoins. We also discuss his vision for Litecoin, why he believes stablecoins aren't superior, why he's considering enabling private Li...

Alexander Zaidelson, the CEO of Beam, a cryptocurrency being built on the MimbleWimble protocol, talks about how he came to start Beam, how it differs from Grin, another cryptocurrency being built on MimbleWimble and what types of users the cryptocurrency is targeting. See the full show notes at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2019/04/16/how-businesses-might-one-day-use-cryptocurrency/ Inte...

Daniel Lehnberg and Michael Cordner, core team members of Grin, discuss the first implementation of the MimbleWimble protocol, named after a tongue-tying curse in Harry Potter. We discuss the many ways in which Grin is similar to Bitcoin: its origin story, its goal to be "digital cash," as Satoshi's paper was subtitled, and even its emission schedule. We discuss how Grin is private, how it is ligh...

In a fireside chat I moderated with SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce held by the Blockchain Digital Asset Forum, in conjunction with the NYU Stern Executive MBA program, on March 26, 2019, she explained where her reputation as 'Crypto Mom' comes from — a desire to look at the world with fresh eyes and say, are there things we can do things better? We also discussed a Bitcoin ETF and the prospects fo...

At the first Unchained Live, Vitalik explained why he thought it was "inevitable" Ethereum would lose some of its lead, when he would be upset if Ethereum were overtaken by a competitor, and whether the Ethereum 2.0 road map was too long. We also discussed why a strain of Ethereum maximalism is emerging, how the foundation sets its funding priorities, whether or not the community should adopt infl...

Ameen Soleimani, CEO of Spankchain, comes on the show to discuss his latest effort to fund Ethereum development through the decentralized autonomous organization MolochDAO. He describes how it works, plus we cover competition in the smart contract space and whether we're seeing the emergence of Ethereum maximalism. Full show notes are back on Forbes.com! See the full recap of this week's recap of...

Tushar Jain and Kyle Samani, managing partners of Multicoin Capital, discuss Binance, Binance Chain and BNB token, and why they believe Binance will become the first centralized company to successfully decentralize itself and migrate the value in itself to its token. We cover what Binance, the centralized company has so far achieved in terms of trading volume, fiat on-ramps, and regulatory arbitra...

Get your tickets now for Unchained Live with Vitalik Buterin! https://www.eventbrite.com/e/unchained-live-with-vitalik-buterin-tickets-56189456176   It will take place March 20th at 6pm at Columbia Journalism School in the Joseph D. Jamail Lecture Hall. Hope to see you there! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mona El-Isa, the cofounder and CEO of Melonport, explains how Melon, the asset management protocol which recently launched on Ethereum, makes launching a fund easier and less expensive, plus gives investors even more transparency into the manager's decisions. She describes who will be using Melon, how the funds using Melon access liquidity if the protocol only connects to decentralized exchanges,...

Glen Weyl, a political economist and social technologist, the coauthor of Radical Markets and a principal researcher at Microsoft, and Santiago Siri, the founder of Democracy Earth, discuss how blockchains can be used to create borderless democracies that can reach any citizen on earth and can be used not just by nation-states but in all kinds of communities such as the workplace, church or a soci...

In case you haven’t heard, I’m doing a live podcast recording with Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum. What is a live podcast recording? It's a podcast performed by me and the guest on a stage, in front of an audience.  Vitalik and I will be discussing Ethereum 2.0, Polka Dot, Substrate, what happened with Afri this week and more. And you’ll have an opportunity to ask questions.  It’ll be in...

Jalak Jobanputra, founder and managing partner of Future Perfect Ventures, talks about how, in 2014, her experience as an investment bank and VC, her global background, and her observation that new streams of data were becoming available led her to launch her first fund, which ended up being 70% invested in blockchain. She describes what it was like selling LPs on the nascent technology in 2014, h...

Jeremy Welch of personal key security system Casa describes the company's various services and products, including its $10,000-a-year premium service for HODLers of at least $500,000 worth of cryptocurrency and the Casa node. He explains how he came to start Casa, why using seed phrases for managing security of crypto hardware devices is so problematic, and how customers should set up the keys in...

Rune Christensen, CEO and cofounder of MakerDAO, explains how multicollateral Dai will work, what happens if one type of collateral fails, and what happens when someone's collateralized debt position with multicollateral Dai needs to be liquidated. He also discusses who gets to participate in the various levels of governance with the MKR token, who owns those tokens and what the purpose of the Mak...