The Defiant

The Weekly Recap is where The Defiant reporters discuss the hottest news of the week and share further insights from our reports. It goes live on our YouTube channel every Friday at 1230 ET. Remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel to keep up with our latest videos!

The Weekly Recap is where The Defiant reporters discuss the hottest news of the week and share further insights from our reports.  It goes live on our YouTube channel every Friday at 1230 ET.  Make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to keep up with our latest videos!

This week on The Defiant Podcast, we speak with Tekin Salimi, the founder of dao5, a Web 3 investment fund founded last year. Tekin was previously at Polychain Capital.  Dao5 is an experimental cryptocurrency investment fund with plans to convert into a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO.  We dive into the biggest DAO drama from the last year, why Tekin is so bullish and excit...

This week on The Defiant Podcast, we speak with Tal Tchwella, Product Manager of Products Engineering at Solana Labs. In our conversation, we dive deep into Tal's work on crypto inside Facebook (Meta), his transition to Solana, the resurgence of NFTs on the network, and all the hype with the $BONK meme coin. We also discuss what it’s like working full-time in Web3, the Solana Phone, as well as the...

Microsoft is a Web2 giant producing software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services. Yorke shares his experience working at Microsoft in a strategy and transformation role in blockchain and Web3 technology, specifically focusing on producing a blockchain-based full-stack application within one of the largest supply chains in the world. We dive into what Microsoft is doing...

Dear Defiers, In addition to our weekly podcast series, we are happy to now bring our Weekly Recap show to all podcast platforms. Weekly Recap is a show where we discuss the hottest news of the week together with The Defiant writers and share further insights from our reports. It goes live on our YouTube channel every Friday. In this week's recap, we discussed SBF getting bailed out of jail, stabl...

This week on The Defiant Podcast, we speak with Adam Cochran, an investor at Cinneamhain Ventures, who's probably most known for his extensive Twitter threads. We kick off our conversation by asking Adam if he expected to turn into a meme in the crypto community for his long-winded tweets. The primary driver behind crypto this year has been traditional macro markets. Crypto markets have been at th...

Dear Defiers, In addition to our weekly podcast series, we are happy to now bring our Weekly Recap show to all podcast platforms. Weekly Recap is a show where we discuss the hottest news of the week together with The Defiant writers and share further insights from our reports. It goes live on our YouTube channel every Friday. In this week's recap, we discussed SBF getting arrested, the Binance inv...

This week on The Defiant Podcast, we speak with Mike Belshe, the CEO of BitGo, a digital asset custodian, wallet, and issuer of wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC). We start our conversation with an overview of BitGo and Mike's crypto journey. Wrapped Bitcoin is the most successful representation of Bitcoin on Ethereum. There’s about 200K Bitcoin in BitGo's custody, which is the equivalent of $3.4B. WBTC is an...

Dear Defiers,  In addition to our weekly podcast series, we are happy to now bring our Weekly Recap show to all podcast platforms. Weekly Recap is a show where we discuss the hottest news of the week together with The Defiant writers and share further insights from our reports. It goes live on our YouTube channel every Friday.  In this week's recap, we discussed SBF agreeing to testify b...

This week on The Defiant Podcast, we speak with Sam Williams, the co-founder and CEO of Arweave, a 'collectively owned hard drive' that enables users to store data, applications, and documents on-chain, forever. We start by learning about Sam's crypto journey, from discovering Bitcoin in 2010 and going on to invest in the Ethereum ICO and finally, starting Arweave. Sam thinks we're seeing a renewe...

Dear Defiers,  In addition to our weekly podcast series, we are happy to now bring our Weekly Recap show to all podcast platforms. Weekly Recap is a show where we discuss the hottest news of the week together with The Defiant writers and share further insights from our reports. It goes live on our YouTube channel every Friday.  In this week's recap, we discussed SBF's recent public appea...

This week on The Defiant Podcast, we speak with Juan Benet, the founder of Protocol Labs and the inventor of the InterPlanetary File System. Juan is also the creator of Filecoin, a storage network incentivized by crypto. Both of Juan’s ventures are hugely ambitious as they are in direct competition with the basic rails of the internet, with protocols such as HTTP and data giants like AWS. We begin...

Dear Defiers,  In addition to our weekly podcast series, we are happy to now bring our Weekly Recap show to all podcast platforms.  Weekly Recap is a show where we discuss the hottest news of the week together with The Defiant writers and share further insights from our reports. It goes live on our YouTube channel every Friday.  In this week's recap, we went through all the latest o...

This week on The Defiant Podcast, Tegan Kline speaks with Bogdan Alexandrescu, co-founder and VP of Engineering at SAGA. SAGA is focused on lowering the barrier of entry for building in Web3 so that developers can spin up a blockchain in a single click, and the company places emphasis on the metaverse. In this conversation, we dive deep into Bogdan’s departure from Apple after six years to work fu...

Dear Defiers,  In addition to our weekly podcast series, we are happy to now bring our Weekly Recap show to all podcast platforms. Weekly Recap is a show where we discuss the hottest news of the week together with The Defiant writers and share further insights from our reports. It goes live on our YouTube channel every Friday. In this week's recap, we went through all the latest on FTX, how f...

This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak with Tyrone Lobban, the head of blockchain at JPMorgan’s Onyx, a business unit focused on digital assets. In the craziness of the past couple weeks, it’s easy to overlook or forget good news and positive developments. JP Morgan recently made history by becoming the first major bank to execute a live DeFi trade. The trade involved tokenized forex and govern...

Dear Defiers, In addition to our weekly podcast series, we are happy to now bring our Weekly Recap show to all podcast platforms.  Weekly Recap is a show where we discuss the hottest news of the week together with The Defiant writers and share further insights from our reports. It goes live on our YouTube channel every Friday.  In this week's recap, we went through the latest updates fro...

This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak with Hamzah Khan, Head of Defi at Polygon. Polygon is one of the biggest players in DeFi with $1.5B in TVL and in the blockchain space in general. Hamzah begins by giving us a brief overview of the Polygon ecosystem. Despite the bear market, Polygon has been forging high-profile NFT partnerships with companies like Instagram and Reddit. Its network was als...

This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak with A.J. Warner, the Chief Strategy Officer at Offchain Labs, the builders of Arbitrum, one of the leading scaling solutions for Ethereum using Optimistic Rollups. We also welcome Tegan Kline, the co-founder of Edge Node, the initial team behind The Graph. The Defiant’s Camila Russo and Tegan are co-hosting the podcast for the first time. Going forward, t...

This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak with Gabriel Shapiro, general counsel at Delphi Labs and a member of the LeXpunK group of crypto lawyers. He’s regarded as one of the most prominent voices on regulation in the crypto space, which has lately been a major point of discussion. Recent developments include the latest draft of the DCCPA bill, Sam Bankman Fried’s industry standards proposal , th...

This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak with Ali Yahya, General Partner at a16z, also known as Andreessen Horowitz. a16z is an investment giant - they’ve raised $6.7B between their crypto funds in the last two years and are the largest crypto-dedicated fund in the world. We start by discussing how a16z got its start in crypto - their first investment, where they channelled their focus, and how t...

This week’s Defiant Podcast is from a conversation I had with Alex Zhang at the Unfinished Live conference. Alex is the mayor of Friend with Benefits, or FWB, a prominent DAO of creatives. Friends with Benefits started as an experiment when its founder minted and airdropped the FWB token to an early community.  FWB holders gained access to private chat groups on Discord.  From there, it...

This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak with David Micley , the business development director at Wintermute, one of the largest digital asset market makers in the world. With all the macro headwinds pummeling markets, from the energy crisis in Europe, global inflation, and war in Ukraine, to the recent turmoil with Credit Suisse, we can’t help but feel a sense of deja vu about the 2008 financial...

This week on The Defiant Podcast we speak with Uri Kolodny and Eli Ben-Sasson, the co-founders of Starkware, one of the leading Layer 2 scaling solutions for Ethereum. Post Merge, Ethereum continues to rely on scaling solutions like Starkware and will continue to do so, according to the network’s long-term roadmap. Visa processes 1700 transactions per second, and that number is often quoted as the...