The Defiant

This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak with Ben Edgington, the product owner of Teku, an Ethereum 2.0 client being developed at Consensys. It’s been a week since Ethereum switched from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and Ben has been heavily involved in the process. We start our conversation by taking a look at the aftermath of the Merge. One of the biggest criticisms of The Merge w...

This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak with Robert Lauko, founder & head of research at Liquity, an overcollateralized DeFi lending protocol and issuer of the LUSD stablecoin. Following the fallout from CeFi services such as Voyager , BlockFi , and Celsius , the focus has shifted back to the core values of decentralization, which Liquity tries to apply to the fullest: LUSD is backed purely...

This week on the Defiant Podcast we speak to Stani Kulechov , founder & CEO of Aave, one of the first lending protocols in the DeFi space. He has been around since the inception of DeFi, now Aave Labs is the leading force in this completely new side to the web3 universe; social media. Lens aims to reimagine how social networks are built; providing an open protocol for applications to flourish,...

This week on The Defiant podcast we speak to Zooko, the founder of  Zcash. Privacy remains one of the hottest issues in crypto after the U.S. Treasury’s recent move to sanction Tornado Cash. Zooko believes the ability to consent to what information is made public is more about freedom than privacy and he thinks that eventually, this will be expected in the blockchain space. We explore what a...

This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak to Jake Chervinsky, the executive vice president and head of policy at Blockchain Association , a non-profit trade association representing the crypto industry in Washington DC. Jake is one of the most qualified to discuss the US Treasury Department sanctioning Tornado Cash , a development that’s caused shockwaves through crypto. Thanking our podcast spons...

This week on The Defiant Podcast, we speak Will Warren, founder and CEO of 0x labs, one of the oldest and largest decentralized exchanges.  0x API is currently the 5th largest DEX by trading volume but is structurally different from other DEXs as it aggregates liquidity from multiple venues. We talk about the effect this bear market has had on the DEX ecosystem and how sliding prices have aff...

This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak to Hart Lambur, co-founder of the UMA protocol. UMA is an optimistic oracle on Ethereum that aims to record any knowable truth onto a blockchain. We discuss his take on the crypto market and how the current crisis is not a DeFi crisis, but rather a failure of risk management at centralized institutions. We dive into UMA's plans for its 2.0 release, the ris...

This week on The Defiant podcast we speak with Justin Drake . Justin is a researcher for the Ethereum foundation. He’s at the forefront of the biggest change to happen in Ethereum's history: The transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake, also known as The Merge. We go into what the next steps are before this change happens, how exactly it will be executed, and what the risks are. Last week,...

This week on the Defiant Podcast we speak to Arthur Breitman, the co-founder of Tezos. Created together with his wife Kathleen way back in 2014, Tezos mainnet was launched in 2018 as a proof of stake chain with smart contracts, a combo that has now become the industry standard. They were very much ahead of their time. Yet, Tezos has been slower to pick up than other Layer 1s such as Ethereum &...

Joseph Delong is the former CTO of SushiSwap, one of the biggest decentralized exchanges, and the founder of Astaria, a recently created NFT lending protocol. Joseph has been heavily involved in building and managing DAOs. With the recent controversial proposals surfacing on MakerDAO and Lido, we are once again reminded of the importance of DAO governance. We begin by talking about Joseph’s analog...

This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak with Hasu , strategic advisor at Lido, strategy lead at Flashbots, MakerDAO delegate, researcher at Paradigm and host of the Uncommon Core Podcast. That’s a lot of titles and it goes to show just how deeply plugged into DeFi and crypto this anon researcher is.   In this episode, we’ll focus on Lido, as it’s become a crucial piece of infrastructur...

Gmoney is one of the most prominent NFT collectors in the space, breaking into the scene with a splash when he bought a crypto punk for 140 ETH last year.  He rose t become one of the best-recognized NFT collectors and is now becoming a creator himself.  Given the current market crash is hitting all areas of crypto, Gmoney dives into how it's affecting NFTs. In his previous life, GMoney...

This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak to Mati Greenspan. Mati is the CEO & founder of Quantum Economics, a crypto research and advisory firm. Mati believes we’ll keep seeing pain in the market, with crypto and stocks remaining highly correlated, as long as inflation persists.  Only those well-funded and committed teams will make it through, and any project that survives a bear will se...

Adriana Hoppenbrouwer-Pereira is the co-founder and CMO of The Fabricant , a digital fashion house for the metaverse founded in 2018. Their belief is that fashion is identity, and digital fashion is simply an extension of the digital identity we’re building in web 3. The Fabricant is one of the most prolific digital garment creators today and we discuss how (and if)  these pieces are being us...

Yoni Assia is the founder and CEO of eToro , one of the most successful crypto and stock buying apps with over 27 million users in more than 100 countries.   Originally founded in 2007, it was one of the pioneering companies to incorporate crypto as early as 2013. Yoni speaks about what led to being so early and where the idea for Etoro stemmed from. He also dives into the importance of...

Kevin Zhou is the founder of crypto quant fund, Galois Capital and former head of trading at Kraken. Last week, Terra, one of the most prominent ecosystems in crypto, effectively disintegrated in days. Its native token Luna had over $40 B in market cap at its peak, and nearly all of it was wiped out while UST, which was supposed to be a stablecoin worth $1 crashed. It was a historical moment in cr...

This week we speak to Diego Fernandez , the secretary of innovation and digital transformation for the city of Buenos Aires. Recently, news broke that Buenos Aires will be taking tax payments via crypto, an initiative that Diego helped shape. We talk about what this means for residents of the city and how it works in practice. Diego also addressed critics’ response to the measure, who questioned w...

BoredElonMusk is one of the most prominent Twitter personalities in the crypto space with over 1.7M followers at the time of recording. With decades of online gaming experience, he is now taking his skills offline with his new venture, Bored Box, a curation platform for blockchain games. BoredElon grew his Twitter profile by consistently tweeting wacky but relatable inventions. We talk about how h...

Fabian Schär is one of the most prominent academics focusing on blockchains and specifically DeFi. He has a great deal of experience speaking with regulators and studying different laws and frameworks being applied to crypto. He argues regulators should not be using old laws to regulate new tech. He also says regulation should happen at the off and on-ramp level, and at individual businesses, but...

Jill Gunter is the co-founder and chief strategy officer at scaling solution Espresso Systems and a venture partner at Slow Ventures. She became interested in Bitcoin via her experience with Latin American markets — which is somewhat of a pattern in the space. She was a debt trader at Goldman Sachs, focusing on Argentina and Venezuelan bonds, and saw crypto’s potential to help those in corrupt or...

We have a special podcast episode this week — a live conversation between Defiant founder Camila, our head of video Robin , and our editor Alp , recorded directly from The Defiant’s video studio in the Netherlands. Robin and Alp were one of the very first team members working with Camila in making the best DeFi and web3 content out there. In this episode we hear their story, how they came to work...

Ethan Buchman is the co-founder of Cosmos , an ecosystem of interoperable blockchains which includes Terra, Osmosis and Crypto.org, and has the most value locked after Ethereum. It's a complex network with many moving parts, and in the past year it has exploded with activity. Cosmos was born out of Ethan’s research into a switch from proof of work to proof of stake, and his idea to enable each pro...

Ken Seiff is the managing partner of Blockchange Ventures , one of the longest-standing venture funds focusing on early-stage blockchain startups. One of his very first forays into crypto was as one of the investors in Ethereum’s token sale, as I describe in my book, The Infinite Machine. He went on to focus on various other Layer 1s at Blockchange, investing in Polkadot, Solana, Near and Flow, am...

Kevin Owocki is the founder of Gitcoin , which helps coordinate crowdfunding for projects and software developments on the Ethereum blockchain.  With 300,000 builders and over 25,000 funders, Gitcoin has become a key pillar of the Ethereum nation, making sure public goods can thrive. We talk about how Gitcoin was born as a reaction to the ICO era, after Kevin realized many of the business mod...

Fabian Vogelsteller is a Blockchain veteran who was part of the Ethereum community in its very early days. He helped shape the Ethereum space, building an ETH Wallet and a web3 Browser, which were one of the first of their kind. Fabian is the co-founder of the Lukso blockchain and together with Vitalik Buterin, created the ERC-20 standard, a foundational building block for Ethereum. The next stand...