Base Layer

Yan joins us to discuss his great book "Inventing Bitcoin" which friend of the show Nic Carter from Castle Island Ventures was quoted as saying: "Having read virtually every Bitcoin explainer, I believe it’s the best from-scratch introduction to Bitcoin, requiring no prior knowledge at all." We also discuss his work at Swan Bitcoin which allows weekly, paycheck, or monthly savings options steadily...

Adam joins me on Base Layer for a straight up fire episode of Base Layer! Adam has spent years in the traditional finance world and has a wealth of experience seeing the sausage made in '08-'09 and throughout. We talk about why PM's/Analysts in Wall Street haven't reviewed Bitcoin to date and why Paul Tudor Jones public announcement and investor letter is about to change all that. We talk about th...

Kosala Hemachandra & Brian Norton from MEW joins Base Layer for a great chat. MEW offers a nexus point for transacting in the Ethereum ecosystem, providing unprecedented access, a secure wallet, and comprehensive education that allows anyone to quickly take advantage of all the benefits of crypto has to offer since 2015. Kosala built the first version of MEW just weeks after Ethereum’s launch in 2...

Brian Kelly joins me on Base Layer for a great, comprehensive chat about the global macro investing backdrop and the role Bitcoin and Digital Assets play in modern day, post COVID-19 portfolio construction. Brian, as many know him, has been a trader for ~30 years and has experienced many of the downturns markets have gone through. He is frequently on CNBC discussing the market and digital assets. 

Tyrone Ross Jr, Director of Community at Altruist and Financial Consultant with 401 comes to Base Layer and it's epic. Tyrone is an incredibly lively and passionate person who I've become friends with; we discuss how Gen Z's are changing the Financial Advisor role, how COVID is changing risk & portfolio's and most importantly how and when Bitcoin will be (or not be) adopted by Financial Advisors -...

Michael joins us on Base Layer from Framework Ventures;  venture capital fund Framework Ventures is investing heavily in the decentralized finance industry, also known as DeFi. The San Francisco-based firm believes that the industry is going to become a $3 billion-plus industry shortly, and will bring major financial institutions on board. The firm was built by Michael Anderson, 29, who grew up in...

Piers joins us on Base Layer to give a full rundown on Radix and Cerberus, a sharded Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) solution to the state machine replication (SMR) problem. While classical SMR protocols ensure global ordering of commands, Cerberus introducesa partial ordering regime that enables a novel state sharding approach. With this approach, the consensus process for commands may be massivel...

Dion joins me on Base Layer to discuss the many narratives affecting our markets and society today. Dion Rabouin is the Axios Markets Editor and author of the Axios Markets newsletter. Prior to Axios, Dion was the anchor of Yahoo Finance's "Midday Movers" and a global financial reporter, coving the bond, equity, and currency markets. He previously covered Treasuries, FX, and emerging markets for R...

Stephanie Link, known for her regular appearances on CNBC joins us on Base Layer to talk about the multitude of macro issues affecting the broad based markets today. Stephanie is a managing director and head of active equities research for TIAA Investments. Prior to joining TIAA Investments in 2016, she spent 7 years at The Street as Chief Investment Officer and was the co-portfolio manager and di...

Billy joins us for an epic conversation about the oil markets and breaks down the last few weeks of unprecedented activity. Billy spent over six years analyzing energy companies and commodities for the legendary late T. Boone Pickens’ investment manager, BP Capital. Prior to founding Saltstone, he served as Portfolio Manager & Senior Research Analyst for the private hedge fund and the BP Capital f...

Thibauld Favre joins us on Base Layer to discuss Fairmint and the CSO; what it means for Founders and Investors. A Continuous Securities Offering (CSO) is a new, updated way for companies to raise funding. The CSO democratizes investing and modernizes it for the digital era. It expands the pool of potential investors, allowing all stakeholders — not just a small group of privileged, wealthy invest...

What a show! Nick Neuman, CEO of Casa Inc and the legendary OG Jameson Lopp, CTO at Casa, join Base Layer to discuss the innovations they are working on for key management of Bitcoin, some of the historical issues that have hindered the adoption of Bitcoin ownership and topics such as the halving as it relates to the macro discussions around the asset. Not to miss! 

Hugo Renaudin, the CEO of LGO, a leading digital asset exchange that works with over 40 Institutional Investors around 15 countries, comes on to discuss the problems they are working to address in digital assets,  how COVID-19 has been impacting review of Bitcoin and other digital assets, "Black Thursday"  and what lessons were learned and much more. 

The legendary investor Mike Maples Jr joins me on Base Layer. Some of Mike’s investments include being one of the first investors in Twitter & Twitch.tv as well as early investor in Chegg, Bazaarvoice, Okta, and Demandforce. Mike comes on to talk about a whole spectrum of issues relating to pre and post COVID19 world as it relates to venture investing; we also talk extensively about Bitcoin and it...

Reuben joins me on Base Layer and we discuss privacy in the time of corona: how is contact tracking, surveillance of those under quarantine, and even the proposed digital dollar impacting privacy? Is the trade-off of individual privacy worthwhile for greater good? How COVID-19 is affecting crypto - While the Feds are "printing money" and considering a “digital dollar” stimulus package, what's happ...

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; wh...

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...

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 (Duque...

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 dec...

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 d...

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...

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 sp...

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 la...

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...

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...