Proof of Story with Rob Sags

Sags and Jordan Horak of Cato Outdoors get into why great hunting dogs can solve problems humans barely understand, how instinct shows up in both dogs and business, and why some of the best outcomes come from operating without certainty.  Here’s what you’ll get from this one:  🔥 Why dogs can smell direction not just scent 🔥 The 3 percent odds behind winning nationals 🔥 Waking up in a cold sweat...

Sags and Thiago Rudiger of TheHUB get into why trading firms keep rebuilding the exact same infrastructure every time they enter a new market and why that cost still hasn’t been solved… Here’s what you’ll get from this one: 🔥 Trading firms pay millions per market just to access the same setup 🔥 No shared infrastructure forces repeated capex across exchanges 🔥 TheHUB collapses multiple markets i...

Sags sits down with @WomanDefi (OG Fogo Community Member) who took a Fogo airdrop and turned it into clean water access for thousands of people in rural Pakistan.  This conversation covers: 🔥 Turning airdrops into real world infrastructure instead of flipping 🔥 What crypto adoption actually looks like in regions still running on cash 🔥 The ground reality of communities spending hours just to ac...

Jdot of Holo Hive breaks down how Korea’s crypto market actually behaves when everyone is aligned and reacting at the same time… Here’s what builders and operators will pull from this conversation: 🔥 Long grind before going full time in Web3 🔥 Free alpha groups outcompeted paid ones by opening access to smaller players 🔥 Korea moves as a collective which amplifies both hype cycles and capital f...

Sags and Mike Cahill get into how Pyth hit the limits of its original model and had to rebuild the entire system around performance, licensing, and real revenue. Here’s what builders, traders, and operators will pull from this conversation: 🔥 Why landing the biggest clients matters more than being the cheapest 🔥 How Pyth moved from public feeds to paid licensed data 🔥 Why 400 millisecond update...

Sags and Kain Warwick of Infinex walk through what actually broke in DeFi from Synthetix to token models to UX, and why most of it was self-imposed… Here’s what you’ll get from this conversation: 🔥 Why early DeFi optimized for ideology instead of users 🔥 How decentralization constraints made products worse than BitMEX 🔥 The SNX debt pool nearly collapsing under leverage and liquidity pressure...

Jowe Stewart got into crypto through a random barbecue conversation and ended up building communities through ICO mania, Polkadot conviction, and now Fogo’s trading-first push as the market shifted under him. Today Jowe and Sags sit down to discuss: 🔥 going from buying Litecoin at $2K Bitcoin to running ICO communities and defending tokens in Telegram 🔥 turning community grinding into a full age...

Sags sits down with Cinder from Pyron to break down why borrow/lend hasn’t scaled… Key takeaways: 🔥 Why most borrow/lend designs fail to scale due to fragmented liquidity 🔥 How looping amplifies exposure and why correlated assets change the risk 🔥 What Fire Mode does differently inside a single market 🔥 Why splitting markets creates hidden inefficiencies 🔥 How early liquidity bootstrapping ac...

Sags and Doug Colkitt break down what actually determines “fairness” in perp exchanges once you separate execution, clearing, and settlement. Here’s what builders and traders will pull from this conversation: 🔥 Why clearing and execution are treated as completely different systems 🔥 How latency only matters on execution and not settlement 🔥 What actually happens from order signing to matching t...

Russ walks through the path from IoT engineer to DeFi builder and how that led to Valiant on Fogo–and why most of what people think matters in perps actually doesn’t. Here’s what builders and traders will pull from this conversation: 🔥 What early Solana actually felt like when everyone was shipping at the same time 🔥 Why hackathon teams won money then immediately fell apart 🔥 What Serum taught...

Sags and Brian Gallagher get into the launch of Parti and how prediction markets inside livestreams are disrupting how people interact with news, sports, and finance online. Tune in for: 🔥 Why livestreams are becoming the main place people discuss current events 🔥 The idea of pinning prediction markets directly above a live chat 🔥 How creators earn fees when viewers trade markets inside their s...

Today Sags sits down with Jamie Brown, co-founder of Global Kiwi Labs and TheHUB, with over 30 years in telecom infrastructure, trading systems, and exchange connectivity. He has led the deployment of wireless and fiber networks into major global colocation sites, delivering low-latency, policy-compliant access for high-frequency trading environments. Jamie previously held senior roles at Teza, Co...

Why step away from foundation leadership? Sags talks through where he’s focusing his efforts now: Building an ecosystem where people are actually shipping things. He gets into: 🔥 Why an L1 only matters when builders start shipping 🔥 Why perp infrastructure always takes longer than expected 🔥 Why gaming builders started exploring Fogo 🔥 Why giving people something fun to do on chain matters Con...

Think crypto’s broken? Sags digs into: 🔥 Why bear markets force crypto projects to prove real business models 🔥 How stablecoins quietly solved payments for many builders 🔥 Why perps markets improved price discovery across crypto 🔥 The rise of token value accrual through buybacks and real revenue 🔥 Why projects without real economics are being repriced 🔥 Why privacy is still one of crypto’s m...

Crypto is full of characters. Builders with crazy stories, pushing the limits of what’s possible. Here we dive into all of it. The behind-the-scenes moments that never show up in protocol docs or conference talks. If you want the real story of how ideas become on-chain reality, this is the place. Welcome to Proof of Story.