CoinDesk Podcast Network

On this special interview episode, @nlw talks with Sergey Nazarov and Kain Warwick, the founders of Chainlink and Synthetix respectively about:  The evolution and goals of Synthetix, a novel type of derivatives exchange where users can interact with any asset with a price feed.  The challenge Synthetix faced around spinning up their own oracles around price feeds The history of their collaboration...

The best way to fund open source projects remains a question, and one that - in the context of crypto protocols - has never had higher stakes. Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen live action experiments in a number of different approaches.  Gitcoin grants used a quadratic funding program to match grants to technology builders and media creators in Ethereum  After months and months of concerted com...

The competition around staking is heating up, and the latest entrant is Binance. US, who will begin to offer staking on two assets with plans to roll out more in the future.  On this episode of The Breakdown, Catherine talks with NLW about: How the company prioritizes both new features and which audiences to build for Why staking is important both for allowing people to do more with their crypto a...

We’re over $9,000! That means a lot of good things, of course. But any price increase brings with it increased scrutiny and, yes, increased FUD. The question for this time around is whether the FUD is the same old same old or something new.  In this episode, @nlw looks at three emergent (and continued) areas of FUD, including: 1) accusations that the bitcoin community is rooting for calamity as th...

The best Sundays are for long reads and deep conversations. Earlier this week, the Let's Talk Bitcoin! Show (Adam B. Levine, Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Jonathan Mohan and Stephanie Murphy) gathered to discuss Lightning Network technology and two innovative approaches at the wallet level which simplify the new-user experience at a tangible, but seemingly minimal cost.  On today's podcast we zero in o...

That’s a wrap! The World Economic Forum is over, and the key ideas coming out of Davos for our industry are: 1) a continued ‘blockchain, not crypto’ narrative; 2) a believe in the inevitability of cashless futures (without much concern about the negative implications); and 3) the rise of CBDCs.  On the CBDC front, the WEF put out a toolkit for governments that are considering their own currency; J...

There is an ongoing debate in the crypto community about where mainstream adoption. One point of view is that it will be the slow steady acceptance of digital assets. On that front, Bakkt president Adam White said in Davos yesterday that the company is on track to launch their app this year.  Another perspective is that the main use case of crypto is to enable otherwise censored transactions. Lend...

News broke yesterday that the Libra Association had seen it’s eighth high-profile defection, this time from the telecom giant Vodafone. In today’s episode of The Breakdown, @nlw argues that Association members are far less of a factor in Libra’s success than key regulatory questions around domiciling, the value peg and the US’s fear of a Chinese digital currency. Also in this episode, Square Crypt...

Ever since announcing their fourth round of grants, Gitcoin has been a major subject of conversation across the Twittersphere. In addition to all the excited buzz from both technical projects and media creators vying for grants matched based on E. Glen Weyl and Vitalik Buterin’s quadratic funding model, there has been controversy. Some of that controversy has been from outside the Ethereum communi...

The best Sundays are for long reads and deep conversations. Earlier this week, the Let's Talk Bitcoin! Show gathered to discuss decentralization in blockchain projects, the historical context of decentralized organizations, the robustness it conveys but also the difficulties it engenders. On today's podcast we apply concepts and stories from "The Spider and the Starfish: The Unstoppable Power of L...

One man. Three piping hot takes. In this special interview episode of The Breakdown, financial advisor and crypto advocate Tyrone Ross shares his thoughts on: Why Financial Advisors are the key to bringing in the next wave of crypto investors Why DeFi is an even bigger deal than you think - and not just to the hackers and entrepreneurs building on it Why Square’s CashApp - not Binance, not Coinbas...

As Libra continues to spur discussions among regulators around the world, and China’s digital yuan comes ever closer to fruition, the U.S. Federal Reserve seems disinclined to look seriously at a digital dollar. Ex-CFTC Chair Chris Giancarlo - aka “Crypto Dad” - isn’t waiting around. He has teamed with Accenture to launch the nonprofit Digital Dollar Foundation. As crypto continues to evolve, it d...

Crypto tokens weren’t the only thing that saw a major pump yesterday. The total value locked in DeFi ascended to new heights. While part of this can be explained simply by the rise in ETH price, it also reflected traders turning to DeFi platforms as a way to get more exposure to the market action without selling their core assets.  For all the exciting price action, not everything is pointing in a...

Bitcoin is up more than 8% in the last 24 hours. BSV, meanwhile, is up nearly a whopping 100%. The question is, of course, why? Is it some larger macro context? A pump-and-dump? Or just the crypto markets being as crazy as they are. The Breakdown invited guest Mati Greenspan, former e-Toro analyst and now founder of Quantum Economics to give his take.  We also look at two stories around the growin...

Starting today, accredited investors will be able to part of $13.5m in tokenized bonds connected to the contract of Brooklyn Nets Point Guard Spencer Dinwiddie. The first-of-its-kind offering took months of negotiation with the NBA but marks a seminal moment for both crypto and the larger idea of Income Share Agreements.  In this podcast, we discuss how big a deal Dinwiddie’s offering is and wheth...

The best Sundays are for long reads and deep conversations. Earlier this week, the Let's Talk Bitcoin! show enlisted CoinDesk reporter Leigh Cuen and early cypherpunk Zooko Wilcox for a conversation on the history, challenges and long term development path of early, formative technologies. which we often hear modern blockchain movements compared against.  From the pre-internet days, through the fr...

China’s digital currency project continues to move ahead aggressively, with a new paper from the People’s Bank of China suggesting that a core design is complete. Whatever stage of development the currency actually is, it’s clear that China wants the world to see it as ahead of the curve in the digital currency race.  In other parts of the world, crypto companies face a never-ending game of regula...

The aftershock of the 2016 The DAO hack meant that DAOs weren’t nearly as hyped as ICOs and later some other aspects of the web3 movement. In 2019, however, DAOs came roaring back and start 2020 with the wind at their sails.  In this episode, we look at the 2019 DAO tale of the tape - what people thought would happen and what actually did happen, including the launch of Moloch, MetaCartel, Ethereu...

The conversation about whether bitcoin is a safe haven asset continues in the wake of Iranian missile strikes, which saw the price of BTC both surge and retrace in parallel with crude and gold. To help explain what’s going on, we feature comments from Ikigai Asset Management’s Travis Kling.  Also in today’s episode, we look at newly published priorities from the SEC around crypto including investo...

In their annual transparency report, Kraken reported seeing a 50% increase in regulatory inquiries as compared to 2018, which CEO Jesse Powell later revealed cost the exchange more than $1m. Between this and stories like the $2m it cost Blockstack to raise $23m in an SEC compliant token sale (8.7% of the raise), it begs the question: will compliance costs fundamentally limit innovation by demandin...

Last week, the US government took out a key Iranian military leader. As the world - and the markets - reacts to the news, some are asking what happens with bitcoin. With global instability on the rise, will more people turn to bitcoin as a safe haven asset? Will speculators drive the price up on that narrative even if it doesn’t bear out in reality? If Iranians use crypto, will that draw the atten...

The past few weeks have seen multiple instances of large, centralized tech giants censoring crypto related content and activity. Noticed in the context of the Coinbase Wallet, Apple is pushing back against apps that have anything to do with Dapps. YouTube caused even more of a stir when it took down hundreds of crypto-related videos from prominent influencers without any warning. It later reversed...

Taylor Monahan is the founder and CEO of MyCrypto. In this interview as part of The Breakdown’s end of year coverage, she argues that the level of discourse in crypto matured in 2019, with more focus on things that actually matter. That’s important, because in 2020, she predicts a major fork-in-the-road moment, where the industry as a whole could either stay on the path set out in its cypherpunk r...

Tom Shaughnessy is a co-founder at Delphi Digital as well as the host of the Chain Reaction podcast. Jordan Clifford is managing director of Scalar Capital. In this end of year interview for The Breakdown, Tom argues that the big story of 2019 was actually the fact that it was all about quiet building. When it comes to 2020, however, watch out for fireworks. Tom predicts we’ll see a major increase...

Katherine Wu was a founding team member at Messari before moving into a VC role at Notation Capital, but is perhaps best known in crypto for her epic annotations of key regulatory enforcement actions. In this end of year interview with The Breakdown, Katherine argues that decentralized finance is the narrative of 2019, but also that when it comes to 2020, the emergence of a Chinese digital yuan is...