The Defiant

In this week’s episode I interview Fred Chesnias, the CEO of Atari.  The video game company now has a token and plans to release a wallet and even an exchange.   The token is an erc20, which Atari hopes will get used across any game, not just their own.   With the token, users will be able to buy Atari NFTs, which include wearables to make a fashion statement in the metave...

In this week’s episode, I speak with Robert Sharratt, managing director at CrescoFin , a Swiss-regulated crypto firm which wants to become a bank alternative. He says Cresco’s objective is to replace banking with code. And while that sounds revolutionary, he’s the first to admit he’s in a “boring business.” He’s not building a yield farming platform that can get you 1,000x yield. He’s building a s...

In today’s episode I talk with Jeff Garzik, the Bitcoin core developer turned DeFi builder.  Jeff comes from leading Bloq, a blockchain infrastructure company focusing on enterprises. As much as decentralized finance is exciting and groundbreaking, he believes its lacking professionalism. Jeff believes DeFi needs to be easy for retail users and for institutional users, not just for crypto nat...

In this week’s episode I speak with Stefan George , the cofounder and CTO of Gnosis . Gnosis is one of the OG Ethereum projects. It was founded in 2015 by Stefan and Martin Koppelman as a prediction market platform on Ethereum and it’s now an ecosystem of financial applications, with a decentralized multi-sig wallet, called Gnosis Safe, and a decentralized exchange. Most recently, Gnosis announced...

In this week’s episode I speak with E.G. Galano, cofounder of Infura, an infrastructure provider for Ethereum and other blockchains. Many Ethereum applications depend on Infura to run their nodes, and it became apparent why that’s problematic recently, when the service provider was having trouble connecting to the Ethereum blockchain, causing much of DeFi to break down. E.G. dives into the recent...

This weeks podcast episode is with Mona El Isa , the co-founder of Melon , a decentralized asset management protocol. Mona tells the story of how she started her career at Goldman Sachs trading equities, derivatives, and all kinds of financial instruments, for a decade. She then went to work with one of Goldman’s hedge fund clients, where she managed a long-short portfolio. With all that experienc...

In this week’s episode, I speak with Illia Polosukhin, cofounder of the Near Protocol and Fernando Martinelli, co-founder and CEO of Balancer Labs . Near is one of the up and coming Layer 1 chains, Balancer is a prominent DeFi protocol and application on Ethereum that will now also be on Near and other blockchains. As for Near being labeled an “Ethereum Killer” Illia says Near is “not trying to ki...

In this week’s interview, I speak with Sam Bankman-Fried , co-founder and CEO of crypto liquidity provider Alameda Research and derivatives exchange FTX, and with Anatoly Yakovenko , the creator of the Solana blockchain. Bankman-Fried, recently announced the launch of Serum, a DEX built on the Solana blockchain. SBF has become known to be a ruthless trader, but he argues he’s simply using DeFi pro...

This week’s interview is with Trevor McFedries , who is behind Lil Miquela , a 19-year-old aspiring pop star with almost 3M Instagram followers, striking deals with Clavin Klein and Prada. But what’s more surprising is that she’s not human. She’s a computer-generated, character. The company that Trevor co-founded, called Brud, created her image and life story. It’s only fitting then that Lil Mique...

The founder of Summa speaks to The Defiant about why he has become disillusioned with decentralized finance. Stories of financial inclusion are much rarer than stories of somebody raising hundreds of millions in a token sale or people throwing money at the latest yield farming protocol. Still, he’s encouraged by the fact that it is much easier to launch a financial service than it ever has been be...

In this week’s podcast episode I interview Tor Bair , the founder of Secret Foundation, an organization which promotes privacy-preserving technologies, with a focus on Secret Network . Secret Network is a proof-of-stake, Cosmos-based blockchain, which has the capacity to process private transactions and, notably, private smart contracts. Tor says that for Web3 to develop into the open and permissi...

I interviewed Simon Taylor . Simon has the rare quality of being very knowledgeable about decentralized finance but also about fintech. He is the co-founder at fintech consultancy firm, 11:FS , and he previously led blockchain research at Barclays. He also leads the excellent newsletter Fintech Brain Food .  Simon points to a world where fintech and defi start to converge. All the capital and...

Hello Defiers! In this week’s interview, I spoke with Gavin McDermott. He's an investor at IDEO CoLab Ventures, the venture arm of design firm IDEO, and he’s one of the creators of Fair Launch Capital. While the name might suggest otherwise, Fair Launch Capital isn’t an investment firm, or at least it’s not a traditional investment firm. Instead, it gives startups no-strings-attached funding so th...

In this week’s episode, I spoke with Dan Elitzer and Clinton Bembry, who were part of the founding team of Yam. Yam Finance is an experiment in rebasing cryptocurrencies, plus token incentives, plus full on-chain governance, plus a DAO-like treasury managed by token holders. It’s also testing the power of the emoji and opened the flood gates to meme-based DeFi tokens. Dan and Clinton tell me the b...

This week’s interview is with Jeff Zirlin, aka Jihoz, growth lead at Axie Infinity . Axie is a digital game built on Ethereum, which involves cute animals going to battle against each other and taking control of your digital assets. The big vision is that as we increasingly live our lives in the digital world, digital assets will become more and more important and applications like Axie Infinity,...

Hello Defiers! In this week’s interview, we chatted with Grammy Award-winning DJ Andre Anjos, aka RAC. Many have seen cryptocurrencies as a way to decentralize the financial system, thanks to the innovation of digital scarcity. RAC says that digital scarcity can also help disrupt the music industry. His experiments have so far showed how distributed networks can be the underlying infrastructure th...

Stani Kulechov the founder and CEO of Aave. When we spoke Aave was the second-largest DeFi protocol, but in the days after our conversation, it rose to overtake MakerDAO and become the DeFi platform with the most assets held in its smart contracts, at over $1B in digital assets. It’s been an exponential rise for Aave, which launched just eight months ago and in that short time was able to climb th...

Santiago Roel is partner at ParaFi Capital, one of the most active investment funds in DeFi. Before going full crypto, Santiago worked at JPMorgan’s investment banking arm, and then invested in fintech and software at a venture fund. He now uses his more traditional VC frameworks to analyze open financial protocols and finds that even by those metrics, DeFi comes out ahead. We also talked about th...

In this week’s episode I speak with Alex Masmej, the first person to raise money by selling tokens not linked to any project, but linked to himself, in a sort of self-IPO. Much like shareholders taking dividends, Alex token holders can have a share of the entrepreneur’s future earnings. The money raised has helped him cover living expenses as he plans to move from Paris to San Francisco and start...

Andre Cronje is the developer of the yearn platform and YFI token. There’s this sort of mysticism around Andre: The solo genius builder who relentlessly releases code even if it hasn’t always been properly audited or tested. The DeFi wizard capable of turning a token which he himself claimed to be valueless to be worth thousands of dollars in a few days. He talks about the actual paralyzing fear t...

In today’s episode, I speak with Polychain Capital founder Olaf Carlson-Wee. He was already telling Wired magazine about programmatic finance back in 2016, so it’s no surprise Olaf is very excited about the growth and promise of DeFi. He thinks smart contracts are enabling different ways of organizing people and capital, turning traditional corporations into internet sovereign corporations. He bel...

In this week’s epidose I speak with Bette Chen and Ruitao Su, who are building DeFi on Polkadot. While most of DeFi is being built on Etheruem, here is the team creating an entire new financial infrastructure on the decentralized network built by the Web3 Foundations and Parity Technologies —which was founded by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood. Their project called Acala, has been mostly known for...

In this week's episode, I speak with Lasse Clausen, founding partner of 1kx, one of the most active venture funds in DeFi. A typical VC question in the traditional tech space is it a 10x? Is it 10 times faster, better, cheaper? This concept has been dressed up very nicely as like, often with grand statements about making the world a better place, but really, Lasse says, VCs are subsidizing a marke...

This week’s interview is with Vansa Chatikavanij , the CEO of OMG Network . The Bangkok-based project formerly known as OmiseGo has spearheaded research and work on a scaling technology for Ethereum called Plasma. Scaling solutions will be key for Ethereum and therefore DeFi,  to continue growing. The network is already at capacity, and gas prices are getting prohibitively high, especially fo...

In this week’s interview, I spoke with Brandon Iles, the CTO of Ampleforth. Brandon  is a former Google and Uber software engineer, and built his first crypto app together with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. Today, he’s trying to rebuild the way money works. For its huge ambitions, Ampleforth is a relatively little-known project. It wants to create an entirely new category of monetary assets —...