The Defiant

In this week’s episode of The Defiant podcast, we speak to Laura Shin , the former senior editor at Forbes and host of the popular podcast Unchained, about her new book ‘ The Cryptopians : Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze.’ In Cryptopians, Laura may have solved Ethereum’s biggest mystery; the identity of the DAO hacker. In this interview, she goes into th...

Gavin Wood ’s crypto journey started with Ethereum – he was one of the eight original founders and the project’s CTO in the early days. Today though, he’s busy building Polkadot , a chain that is attempting to improve where Ethereum falls short. Gavin wants to turn Polkadot into a multichain powerhouse where financial systems and web apps can run and interact seamlessly. To Gavin, Polkadot can be...

Edan Yago is a co-founder of Sovryn , a Bitcoin-based lending protocol. He’s maybe the first Bitcoin builder we have had on our show and that’s because DeFi on the first blockchain network has been slow to pick up — but Edan says that’s about to change. Ethereum and other smart contracts platforms have evolved over time with use cases like tokens, DAO’s and NFTs flourishing. Meanwhile, Bitcoin has...

Vitalik Buterin wrote the Ethereum white paper when he was just 19. His aim was simple yet comprehensive, to create a ‘world computer’ that was designed to be a flexible base layer for all online applications without the need of any third party. Since its inception in 2015, Ethereum has become the most active and largest smart contracts platform, but has it achieved the ‘world computer’ goal? Vita...

Griff Green is one of the co-founders of Giveth , which aims to build the future of charity using the Ethereum blockchain. It wants to become the gateway for non-profit organizations into web3, giving them the tools to grow their own communities via DAOs and crypto. The primary source of revenue for any non-profit organization is donations, but relying on individuals giving voluntarily can limit t...

When Emin Gun Sirer first came on The Defiant in May 2020, Avalanche was not even on mainnet yet. Since then, it has risen to become one of the leading smart contract networks, while the AVAX token has risen over 7x in the last 12 months. We talk about how the project got here and how it wants to create a path for faster and more scalable decentralized network, amid heavy competition from other La...

This week, we sit with Kain Warwick , DeFi OG and founder of Synthetix . In some ways, last year wasn’t a great one for the synthetic assets protocol. As many DeFi projects boomed, SNX’s price and TVL dropped. Kain says he was too optimistic about how soon Synthetix would be able to scale with optimistic roll-ups. If he were to do things again, he would probably use Polygon first and move to Optim...

Welcome back to The Defiant podcast! After a brief break at the end of last year, we’re back stronger and better than ever to continue chatting with the greatest and brightest minds in DeFi and web3. Our first guest is our very own Robin Schmidt, aka SuperMassive . Robin leads multimedia at the Defiant and produces our video content, which has become known for raising the bar way beyond what’s exp...

In this week’s episode I speak with Nick Johnson , founder and lead developer of Ethereum Name Service, or ENS . Nick talks about the journey of ENS, from an internal project within the Ethereum Foundation, to spinning off to become a public good for Ethereum and other blockchains, and recently decentralizing and becoming a DAO controlled by token holders. Nick talks about the big vision of ENS, w...

In this week’s episode I speak with Geoff Cook, co-founder of Base , a design studio with huge clients from all industries, including The New York Times, MoMA, ING Bank and large-scale projects like JFK’s Terminal 4 and the Meatpacking District in New York. Geoff hopes to soon add crypto to the list. He recently wrote an article stating that "For Crypto, Branding Could be the Highest Currency ” as...

In this week’s episode I, speak with Nadya Tolokonnikova , one of the founding members of the feminist punk rock protest collective, Pussy Riot . Nadya has been protesting against the repression of individual freedoms in Russia since she was 17. She started Pussy Riot to focus on women and non-binary people as she noticed leadership would always fall on men. The group started performing in the str...

Zeneca is an NFT investor and content creator who grew his collection of non-fungible tokens from 0 to about 3,000 pieces worth millions in less than a year. He comes on the podcast to talk about how he went from professional poker player to full-time NFT trader, and what lessons from poker he has brought over to crypto. Zeneca believes the NFT market has hit a downturn amid rising crypto prices b...

In this week’s episode I speak with Eric Wall , chief investment officer at Arcane Assets . He used to be known as the Altcoin Slayer, thanks to his brutal takedowns of non-bitcoin tokens in the 2017 ICO era, which made him popular among Bitcoin maximalists. But he’s not a maximalist anymore, and sees value in other blockchains as he has recognized they can fulfill use cases that Bitcoin can’t. He...

In this week’s episode I speak with Scoopy Trooples , founder of Alchemix , a protocol that programs self-paying loans without the risk of liquidations. Think about that; here’s a DeFi application that promises to automatically pay users’ collateralized loans, and on top of that, guarantee they won’t be liquidated. Scoopy explains how something like that can work and it’s all about plugging into o...

In this week’s episode, I interview Adam Jackson , co-founder of Braintrust , a user-owned talent network. Think Fiverr for web3. Braintrust runs on Ethereum, has thousands of users, household names like NASA, TaskRabbit, Nike and Nestlé are clients, it has processed millions of dollars, yet not many people in the crypto community have heard of it.  And it may be by design, as the team has fo...

In this week’s episode I speak with Yam Karkai , the digital illustrator and artist behind NFT project World of Women . She’s had all sorts of odd jobs, before becoming a full-time illustrator, and none of them had anything to do with crypto. She was freelancing from gig to gig when she discovered NFTs this year and that’s when everything changed for her. For the first time ever, she had some econ...

In this week’s episode, I interview Jaime Rogozinski , founder of Wall Street Bets , the famous Reddit trading group which earlier this year organized to push up the price of heavily shorted stocks like Gamestop and AMC to create a short squeeze, which had the double benefit of amplifying the group’s gains and screwing over big hedge funds. Jaime goes over what led him to create the subreddit back...

In this week’s episode we speak with Matthew Sigel , head of digital asset research at VanEck , an asset management firm overseeing $80 billion, which has shifted its focus heavily into crypto. They started out with investments almost exclusively in Bitcoin, but now, with Matthew on board, the firm is becoming increasingly bullish on Ethereum and DeFi. Matthew has a very methodical way of analyzin...

In this week’s episode I speak with Stephen Young , the founder and CEO of NFTfi , a platform for enabling NFT-backed loans. For some people, decentralized finance and nonfungible tokens sit on two separate worlds; DeFi on one end with its different lending, boring, and trading applications, and NFTs, with their digital art, music royalties and collectibles. Entrepreneurs like Stephen sit at the i...

In this week’s episode, I speak with John Crain , the co-founder & CEO of SuperRare , one of the top NFT marketplaces. SuperRare wants to differentiate itself by being the NFT marketplace that best curates art, specifically. John believes the natural evolution for NFT platforms will be to specialize in verticals. The team recently launched a token and a DAO, and John explains how the move will...

In this week’s episode, I speak with Gabby Dizon , co-founder of Yield Guild Games, or YGG. Long before Gabby was into crypto he was into gaming, and that’s how he started playing Axie Infinity, a blockchain-based game where players earn cryptocurrency just for playing. Gabby eventually became a well-known figure in the Axie community, spreading the word especially in his home country, the Philipp...

In this week’s episode, we speak with Dan Morehead , the founder of one of the longest-standing and largest crypto funds. Dan founded Pantera Capital in 2003 as a global macro hedge fund. In 2013, Pantera began investing in Bitcoin and quickly shifted its entire focus into crypto. Today, Pantera manages $3.8 billion in digital assets and equity in blockchain companies. Dan said Pantera is planning...

In this week’s episode we speak with Ryan Selkis , CEO and founder of Messari , one of the most popular crypto data and research companies.  Recently, Ryan has been very vocal about crypto regulation in the US. We talk about how he believes the infrastructure bill was a catalyzing event for the whole American crypto ecosystem. He believes while there are think tanks and corporate-led lobbying...

In this week’s episode we interview Nate Chastain , head of product at OpenSea. Opensea got its start back in 2017 when CryptoKitties launched on Ethereum. After those digital cats, the NFT space was pretty dead for the next couple of years. Now OpenSea is reaping the rewards of hanging through that NFT winter, as NFT summer explodes with punks, apes, penguins and more cats. Nate was openSea’s fir...

In this week’s episode, I speak with some of the creators and investors behind Stoner Cats , the NFT-infused adult cartoon show about a group of cats who become sentient from their owner’s marihuana. And there are famous humans behind these cats, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin is one, and Jane Fonda is another. Ashton Kutcher’s VC fund is also involved. With all these big names, there was huge a...