Sina Habibian Podcast

This is my conversation with Rebecca Rettig and Michael Mosier. Rebecca is the Chief Legal and Policy Officer at Polygon Labs. Michael is cofounder of Arktouros and partner at Ex Ante. Timestamps: (00:00:00) - intro (00:01:38) - sponsor: Privy (00:02:59) - Rebecca's background, the Silk Road case, Aave, Polygon (00:07:22) - Michael's background, Department of Justice, FinCEN, Espresso Systems, the...

This is my conversation with Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum. Timestamps: (00:00:00) - intro (00:01:07) - sponsor: Optimism (00:02:17) - micro prediction markets, community notes, AIs as participants (00:14:13) - decentralized social networks, zk identity, Dark Forest, and Frogcrypto (00:25:54) - the dense jungle (00:30:08) - sponsor: Privy (00:31:29)  - political instability, technology (00:...

This is my conversation with Hart Lambur. We talk about Hart's path in building UMA (an oracle using schelling points to bring data onchain), Across (an intents-based bridge connecting ETH/L2s), and now Oval (MEV capture for oracle price updates). Timestamps: (00:00:00) - Intro (00:01:29) - Sponsor: Privy ( privy.io ) (00:02:50) - The idea maze, Goldman Sachs, RFQ systems, legal vs smart contracts...

This is my conversation with Jesse Pollak. He led retail engineering at Coinbase for many years — building Coinbase, Coinbase Pro, and Coinbase Wallet. More recently, he is leading the development of Base, Coinbase's L2 built on the OP Stack. Timestamps: (00:00:00) - intro (00:01:43) - sponsor: Optimism ( optimism.io ) (00:03:07) - motivation behind Base (00:11:12) - pitching Base to the Coinbase...

This is my conversation with Liam Horne, former CEO and advisor to Optimism Labs. Timestamps: (00:00:00) - intro (00:00:59) - sponsor: Privy (privy.io) (00:03:35) - early influences, classmates with Vitalik in Waterloo (00:08:31) - Ethereum's potential and why scalability matters (00:10:06) - learning from Jeff Coleman (00:17:23) - defining a common language (00:21:06) - importance of community in...

This is my conversation with Aya Miyaguchi, Executive Director at the Ethereum Foundation. Timestamps: (00:00:00) - intro (00:01:20) - sponsor: Optimism (optimism.io) (00:02:32) - reflecting on early days of Ethereum (00:08:54) - Ethereum as an Infinite Garden (00:19:08) - books and ideas that influenced Aya (00:24:48) - the insignificance of titles (00:31:56) - what does “Executive Director of th...

This is my conversation with Dan Romero about Farcaster - a decentralized social network being developed as an open protocol. We talked about how product decisions in social networks have ripple effects on society, Farcaster’s strategy in the highly competitive world of social products, and Dan's personal philosophies around hiring and team building. Timestamps: (00:00:00) - intro (00:02:08) - why...

This is my conversation with Jango and Nnnnicholas from Juicebox Protocol. Juicebox is a playful but ambitious project: the DAO operates as a full-stack instantiation of the protocol it's building, and fully reconceptualizes the relationship between contributors and shareholders. It has powered projects like SharkDAO, ConstitutionDAO, and AssangeDAO in the past. Timestamps: (00:00:00) - intro (00:...

Nadia Asparouhova is an independent researcher. She previously wrote about her research on open-source communities in "Working in Public", and more recently, has been researching the history of and approaches to philanthropy - which she defines with this phrase “if venture capital is risk capital for private goods, philanthropy is risk capital for public goods”. In this conversation, we talked abo...

Julien Niset is the cofounder and Chief Science Officer at Argent, a crypto wallet that's used and loved by many people in the crypto ecosystem. In this conversation, we talk about how Argent has evolved to get to where it is today. How Julien sees user experience evolving broadly in the ecosystem, and what the flow of a new person interacting with a crypto application for the first time might loo...

Pedro Gomes is the cofounder of WalletConnect, a communications protocol that enables wallets and apps to securely connect and interact. In this conversation, We talked about WalletConnect v2 and its architecture, account abstraction, potential downstream effects of a crypto-native chat protocol, and other topics. Timestamps: (00:00:00) - intro (00:08:00) - developing the user experience before cr...

Here is my conversation with Josh Stark . Josh has a long history in the Ethereum ecosystem going back to the early days of the community. He cofounded one of the first L2 scaling protocols with Counterfactual. He also cofounded ETHGlobal which is a much-loved series of hackathons/events that brings the community together and which acts as an entry point into the ecosystem for many people. And now...

0age is the Head of Protocol Development at OpenSea , and this was a conversation about Seaport , the new marketplace protocol for buying and selling NFTs. 0age takes us through a tour of the Seaport protocol, talking about how it's architected; how conduits and zones work; and we even get into the low level gas optimization work they've done on the contracts. I hope this can be a helpful resource...

Charles St. Louis is the COO at Element Finance, a protocol for fixed and variable rate yield markets and previously the governance architect at MakerDAO. In this conversation, we talked about Element’s governance system - with a particular focus on voting vaults, a powerful new primitive that decouple the relationship between capital and voting power and allow much more expressiveness in how user...

Here is my conversation with Henri Stern who is building Privy . Henri was previously a research scientist at Protocol Labs and worked on Filecoin’s consensus protocol. And after many years of thinking through problems related to data privacy and security, he recently co-founded a new company called Privy where they provide a suite of API tools to store and manage user data off chain. In this conv...

Matthew Chaim is building a laboratory experimenting at the edges of music and web3. It's called Songcamp , and right now they're running their third immersive experience. They're coming together with a group of musicians, visual designers, developers, and at the end of this process, will be releasing new music under the moniker of a single headless artist called Chaos. I've been personally comple...

Here is my conversation with Simon de la Rouviere . Simon’s exploration of creative mechanism design through the years is documented on his blog . His contributions to the space range from seeding the idea of bonding curves and curation markets, to building one of the first creator platforms with Ujo, to writing a full length novel experimenting with different publishing models, to now working on...

Here is my conversation with David Greenstein , Matt Masurka (Gigamesh) , & Vignesh Hirudayakanth , the cofounders at Sound.xyz . Sound is a platform that helps musicians host listening parties and engage with their fans. It's a suite of tools that will grow over time to help musicians make a living using NFTs and other web3-native primitives. I was particularly looking forward to this convers...

Mike Sall and Blake West are the founders of Goldfinch , a decentralized protocol facilitating uncollateralized credit. “One of the borrowers is a company based in Uganda. They provide rent-to-own loans for motorcycle taxis to thousands of customers. They've borrowed $5m to expand their operations." Thousands of people in countries like Uganda, India, and Brazil have been financed by Goldfinch loa...

The conversation on publishing today is the very first one I recorded for the podcast about six months ago. It's a conversation with Justin Glibert about patterns he's uncovered while building Ember (an onchain game) and Lattice (the engine behind the game) — patterns related to inflation and zero sum resources, spacial constraints, and user impersonation. I hope you enjoy. Sina Habibian: https://...

This is a conversation with Phillip Wang and Nate Foss two of the co-founders of Gather . Gather is a video chat platform that puts you and the people you're communicating with in a virtual space - and gives you the ability to move around and interact with them based on your locations in that space, just like in real life. It's had a ton of traction over the last year and is being used by millions...

This is a conversation with Tracheopteryx about the evolution of Yearn, Coordinape, and pseudonymity. Tracheopteryx has been a key leader in the Yearn Finance community since its legendary genesis event. In this conversation, we talk about key moments in Yearn's evolution with an eye towards takeaways that might be useful for other projects. We talk about the introduction of the multisig; the mint...

This is a conversation with John Palmer and Danny Aranda about PartyDAO and PartyBid - the product that lets people pool their funds and participate in NFT auctions as a team. We dive deep into their experience building this project. We talk about what they see as the role of product vision in the DAO, how they think about hiring, the organizational design, the stack of tools they use to operate,...

This is a conversation with Austin Griffith about his continued journey as a builder/educator, and learnings from onboarding thousands of developers onto Ethereum. Austin is a friend and someone I've had the good fortune of working with extensively in our shared time at the Ethereum foundation. In this conversation, we take a tour through the different projects he's worked on over the last two yea...

This is a conversation with Gubsheep about Dark Forest and building crypto-native games. Dark Forest is a uniquely crypto-native game, and embodies patterns that we can all learn from. It's a game that takes place in a procedurally-generated universe that's shared by all players, where the smart contracts enforce the rules of the game, but where they don't leak information about what each player i...