The Rollup

Innit interesting building in a bear market. A pump here and there doesn't hurt but we are enjoying the thoughtful conversations with those building decentralized tech to change the world (and perhaps their wallet a bit along the way). The mood in this market trough is settling. The weak hands are almost all shaken out and those left standing are the builders or the diamond hands with unwaveri...

Happy Friday! Hope everyone has had a great week full of productivity and learning! Over the last couple of years we’ve seen an tremendous amount of execution and growth in DeFi. Builders have been put to the test with great market conditions and also not so great conditions and have seen the positive and negative consequences of this! With great speed and execution, comes a lot of coding errors a...

Things are heating up in the NFT world as we speak…but what’s next with DeFi & CeFi? Seemingly plagued with contagion, lending desks going under, and exploits all over the future of DeFi has never looked so bleak. But, is it really? Methinks not so much. We have more and more innovation happening on L2s, a rising importance of self custody, and the tourists are gone. The real builders are play...

As the Blockchain landscape looks to scale for greater magnitude of throughput, the rollup ecosystem is taking DeFi by storm. Rollups can be built from a few different core technologies: ZK, optimistic, proofs, or two examples. In this podcast, we talk to Neel Somani, founder of Eclipse, who is approaching the rollup scalability problem, a bit differently than other existing rollup solutions. Ecli...

NFTs are going to come ROARING back to the front and center of crypto. It’s already happening. Pudgy Penguins have had an incredible year of success in this bear market, consistently grinding higher and higher in floor price and community. Partially due to the cuteness of the penguins, but mostly because of the new ownership led by Luca Netz. In this podcast we sit down with Luca to discuss the fu...

It’s no surprise the GameFi ecosystem is one of the few surviving ecosystems in blockchain and cryptocurrencies. GameFi doesn’t care about interest rates, the Fed, or macro mumbo jumbo. GameFi is about fun and vibes, both of which the industry still has in abundance. On today’s episode we debunk low DAU numbers in the “metaverse” to understand the community of GameFi. Decentral Games is one gaming...

What a last couple weeks its been! We have some content coming your way from Token2049 in London soon as well as a new podcast today with Revoke Cash is a public good in the DeFi community keeping users safe since the inception of yield farming. In todays pod we discuss the ins and outs of security and safety when interacting with DeFi protocols and how to stay safe as a user! 𝗪𝗲 𝘁𝗿𝘆 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗯𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗽...

Despite the turmoil of contagion, our industry is fit for a change decentralization advocates always knew was inevitable. The recent fall of FTX has shown we need trustless DeFi protocols now more than ever. There’s no need to be upset. A wise voice is with us today. Head Chef of SushiSwap, Jared Grey, joins DeFi by Design for a discussion about the future of our industry. We cover his vision of t...

Blockbuilding has become a profitable venture after the transition to Proof of Stake in Ethereum’s recent upgrade. Before, we had miners who extracted value and dubbed this term Miner Extractable Value. Now, we have maximum extractable value (new term, of course). This episode is a deep dive into what makes up the ever so valuable block space of Ethereum. We discuss the ins and outs of possible ME...

There’s been a few reasonably sized debates on Twitter about Ethereum’s scaling roadmap including proto-dank-sharding. Some dot eth’s seem to like it while others think its foolish. While you may or may not have an opinion, there is something you should know as a crypto user. Shardeum is taking sharding to a whole ‘nother level with their notable tech stack that includes high levels of security, u...

Welcome to the future. Blockchain infrastructure development is going into hyperdrive with innovative technology driving TPS (transactions per second) of new blockchains through the roof. This tech paves the way for killer applications to quickly iterate on user experiences. Think about scalability on the magnitude of text messages sent per day across the world. That’s the level of throughput app...

We’re not out of the woods yet, but things are looking up. On the macro scale, fiat currencies are repricing based on the competency of their central banks. Putin looks like he is easing off the heavy dosage. US inflation seems to have peaked. The worst may be behind us. Enough of the macro BS, let’s get back to building. Today’s podcast dives into a tool to simplify on-chain yield. In this episod...

The historic transition to Proof-of-Stake is complete with relatively zero issues. ICYMI we'll give you the rundown. Once hashing power on the Proof-of-Work chain brought mining difficulty to the TTD, total terminal difficulty, it was the end of an era. Reaching TTD triggered the merge of Ethereum's beacon chain into the running chain and began the Proof-of-Stake on Ethereum as beacon chai...

The historic transition to Proof-of-Stake is complete with relatively zero issues. ICYMI we'll give you the rundown. Once hashing power on the Proof-of-Work chain brought mining difficulty to the TTD, total terminal difficulty, it was the end of an era. Reaching TTD triggered the merge of Ethereum's beacon chain into the running chain and began the Proof-of-Stake on Ethereum as beacon chai...

The merge is coming! Scheduled for September 18th (or around there) the Ethereum merge to proof-of-stake is going to be a monumental moment for the entire space. What’s interesting about proof of stake is that the network is secured by validators who earn staking rewards in the native token (ie ETH, BNB, AVAX, etc.) which allows there to be a liquid staking model like the one provided by Ankr. Thi...

Coming off a fantastic day at StarkNet filled with lots of builders in the ecosystem and talks from highly talented developers and builders. We were able to do a few interviews with some teams and enjoy a good last day of conferences. One of the teams we met in Paris was Jedi Swap, who are building a native AMM on StarkNet. In todays podcast we sit down with Rohit, a core contributor of Jedi Swap...

We are headed into a full week of ETHCC conference vibes. We have a ton of interviews lined up to share as we explore novel projects bringing ideas to life on-chain. In today’s podcast we host Archisman Das from Brew Money to explore a journey through the evolution of DeFi. Everyday new apps innovate the existing blockchain framework while UX lags behind. Brew Money brings a fresh, yet familiar an...

The markets never cease to entertain. CeFi is going up in flames as Celsius faces lawsuits in New York for shady hiring practices. Meanwhile, Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX is at the center of this whirlpool with outstanding loans due to the now bankrupt, Voyager, and consequently placing bids for the outgrown CeFi company BlockFi and Alas, we continue to build. The digital nation state is at a stage wh...

The growth of money markets started with the inception of Compounds yield farming back in early 2020! This was my first foray into DeFi as I saw what was happening in the world of yield farming. I remember going on Argent wallet and playing around with depositing different tokens on Compound. Gas fees were even cheap back then! Since then we’ve seen many different developments of tokenomics and ty...

The combination of sports and Web3 is making a massive splash as you read this! There are dozens of NFT projects and sports betting applications being built on top of Ethereum and smart contracts. Due to the presence of rent-seekers like FanDuel and DraftKings, as well as ticketing services like StubHub and TicketMaster, there is a MASSIVE amount of capital & value being captured by these midd...

The evolution of stablecoins has been a mighty topic of discussion as the crypto markets recover from the Black Swan that was LUNA/UST. We’re always interested to see how mass carnage can further push innovation in breaking edge tech. Pushing forward we will see risk managed by protocols & DAOs, a deeper level of due diligence and better projects built! We are currently seeing the development...

The multichain ecosystem is expanding w great speed and innovation. Bridge infrastructure from one chain to another is lacking sufficient liquidity and connectivity to effectively keep pace with the innovations on new chains. Enter, Router Protocol. Router protocol is building a web of communication relayers to streamline the bridging infrastructure and bring cross-chain efficiency to the DeFi wor...

The winners and losers of DeFi are separated in the trenches. As market cycles shift, we are starting to see massive opportunities for growth as market cycles turn towards a new frontier. After an initial foray in Web1, Dave Levine has been OG gem hunter in DeFi since the early days of blockchain. Fast forward a few years and Dave is hunting yield on various protocols across several chains. In thi...

Stablecoin wars are here and they are in full force. The best yields in DeFi, the strongest designs, and everything in between. One of the OG stable coins in DeFi that has never had a 1% peg movement and has a considerable advantage over others in terms of Lindy effect (basically, its been around longer than some of the newer ones/has a better track record) is $FRAX. Frax Finance is a fractional r...

The return of veTokenomics is on the rise with new DEXs in DeFi. The idea behind vote locking is a novel, complex mechanism which attempts to build a longer term value proposition to the token holders of that token. The initial introduction to this was CRV & veCRV, which has been the staple of yield in DeFi. In this episode of DeFi By Design, we chat with Andrea Cianfruglia & Alan Stivelma...