Unchained

Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain, cofounders of Multicoin Capital, dive deeply into their sometimes controversial and unpopular opinions on how the crypto revolution will play out. They describe why they don't think the technology that a team develops early on will play nearly as big a role as some think, why there will be a spectrum of blockchains offering different features with different tradeoffs,...

Paul Walsh had long ago predicted that internet scams would migrate from email to private messaging platforms, but it wasn't until crypto mania took off that his thesis was proved right -- in a big way. In the summer of 2017, the founder and CEO of MetaCert discovered many crypto Slack channels were being overrun by scammers capitalizing on FOMO to get people to inadvertently give them their ether...

In this live recording of a panel discussion at the CoinAlts Fund Symposium, Marco Santori, president and chief legal officer of Blockchain, managing director at Grayscale Investments, and Barbara Minuzzi, cofounder and managing partner of Ausum Ventures take stock of the 2017 year and discuss a range of trends they're seeing in the industry. Santori describes what the ICO wave was like from his s...

If U.S. crypto regulation seems incredibly convoluted, this is the episode for you. Perianne Boring, the founder and president of the Chamber of Digital Commerce, and its global policy director and general counsel Amy Kim, discuss why U.S. regulation calls crypto assets currency, property, commodities and securities, and how that results in agencies enforcing their own laws without a higher level...

Through Inforum at the Commonwealth Club, I recently moderated a sold-out discussion on the basics of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. My guest was Kathryn Haun, a former federal prosecutor who is now teaching a class on cryptocurrency at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and serves on the boards of Coinbase and Hacker One. We go through all the elementary questions most newbies ha...

Valery Vavilov and George Kikvadze of Bitcoin mining and blockchain software company Bitfury discuss why the firm has partnered with the publicly traded Hut 8, how it plans to branch out into mining other crypto assets, and how it chooses where to open mining operations. They also explain how low the bitcoin price can go before mining will be unprofitable for them, what their new blockchain analyt...

In an intermittent series on cryptoeconomics, Olaf Carlson-Wee and Ryan Zurrer of crypto hedge fund Polychain Capital describe what cryptoeconomics is, what goals it typically helps networks accomplish and what behaviors token systems might someday incentivize. We discuss when cryptoeconomic models don't make sense, how the type of consensus algorithms a blockchain chooses can affect behavior in t...

Zooko Wilcox, the founder and CEO of the Zcash company, explains why he wanted to create the privacy coin Zcash, why he believes privacy is essential to decentralization, and how encryption is the way censorship-resistance can be created on a technical level. We talk about the revelation that the NSA was targeting Bitcoin users by gathering details on their devices and how even Zcash users could b...

Arianna Simpson, managing partner of investment firm Autonomous Partners, discusses this week's news that Cambridge Analytica had used data from Facebook to perhaps manipulate the 2016 election and whether that could create an opening for blockchain-based decentralized social networks. We also cover the announcement that Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures and top individual investors inves...

Mike Belshe, the founder and CEO of BitGo, talks about one of the biggest problems facing crypto today: security. We discuss some of the ways BitGo has resolved this issue, whether that still leads to single points of failure, and what the company's recent acquisition of Kingdom Trust (a "qualified custodian" as defined by the 1940 Investment Company Act) means for the space -- hint, it may have t...

At the Founders Organization's Initial Taco Offering, an unofficial SXSW event, the co-authors of the recently released Truth Machine, talked about a wide range of regulatory issues from what the SEC subpoenas mean to whether or not the SEC is investigating the SAFT to whether or not the regulators should address crypto on a federal level. We also discuss central bank cryptocurrencies, how the dol...

Wyoming now has five blockchain-specific laws. Caitlin Long, cofounder of the Wyoming Blockchain Coalition, describes what these laws are, what they mean, and how our least populous state became a crypto leader. The former chairman and president of Symbiont explains what this could mean for any project that aims to launch a utility token, whether or not ICOs held in Wyoming would only be available...

Amber Baldet, JPMorgan Chase blockchain program lead, talks about what she was discussing at SXSW with Hyperledger executive director Brian Behlendorf and what themes she heard at the Ethereum Community Conference in Paris. She talks about privacy in financial transactions, how "immutable" blockchains might conflict with a new EU privacy law granting people the "right to be forgotten." And we brie...

As a former government official, current board member of Coinbase and professor at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Kathryn Haun has a unique and varied view of the crypto space. She doesn't necessarily see the SEC subpoenas as a reason to be alarmed and compares it to her work as a federal prosecutor. We also discuss the FinCen letter and why her take is different from the fea...

Preston Byrne, an independent consultant and English lawyer, and Angela Walch, an associate professor at St. Mary’s University School of Law who focuses on blockchain technology, both explain their criticisms of the crypto space, give grades to regulators on their job so far, and how they think major players in the space can improve. They discuss what systemic risks they believe crypto could pose...

Spencer Bogart, partner at Blockchain Capital, discusses why he think Bitcoin's growing pains are a sign of success, how the SEC regulatory gloom could affect the development of crypto and how a liquidity crunch could affect crypto hedge funds. We also take a peek at the coming platform wars. Blockchain Capital: http://blockchain.capital/ New crypto hedge funds: https://hackernoon.com/the-fate-of-...

Will Warren, cofounder of decentralized exchange protocol 0x, was working on building tokenized derivatives for Ethereum when he and his cofounder realized there would be no place to trade them. They ended up pivoting to create a decentralized exchange protocol, 0x, that enables companies to use that infrastructure to direct fulfill trade orders without worrying about a Mt. Gox- or Bitfinex-type h...

Future Perfect Ventures' founder and managing partner Jalak Jobanputra and I discuss the New York Times article earlier this week about how few women there are in crypto. We discuss some of the surprising comments we saw from women in the space who wish the story hadn't been written and Jobanputra's new effort to increase diversity in crypto, The Collective Future. The New York Times article: http...

Rune Christensen of MakerDAO and Philip Rosedale, founder of Second Life and High Fidelity, discuss why stablecoins are called crypto's holy grail, why they may be what's necessary for mainstream adoption, and all the ways a stablecoin can be constructed. Philip brings in his experience with Second Life's Linden dollars, often called the first true virtual currency, to describe how it was construc...

Subscribe to my new show, Unconfirmed! Here's a sample: Brian Kelly of BKCM talks about token-curated registries, such as the proposal for Messari, by Ryan Selkis, formerly of Digital Currency Group and CoinDesk, and why such TCRs are probably a good idea, but what pitfalls they may face. We also discuss the highly anticipated launch of crypto trading on Robinhood and look behind the scenes at Ven...

The cofounder of MyEtherWallet and CEO of newly launched MyCrypto walks us through the nuts and bolts of how MyCrypto works, how it differs from a company like Coinbase, why the keys you get from the site even enable to work offline -- and how the company makes money. She also describes how the crypto community changed in 2017, her crazy sleeping schedule during that year, and how she responds whe...

Check out the first episode of Unconfirmed, in which Olaf Carlson-Wee, CEO and founder of Polychain Capital, discusses why an issue facing the Ethereum community right now has him thinking about on-chain governance. If you enjoy the episode, subscribe to Unconfirmed today! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Unconfirmed: Insights and Analysis From the Top Minds in Crypto drops today! The first guest is Olaf Carlson-Wee, CEO and founder of crypto hedge fund Polychain Capital. We discuss the week's news and what is on Olaf's mind these days. It's available on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, Soundcloud, Spotify, TuneIn and wherever you get your podcasts. Check it out and subscribe today! Online at...

Erik Voorhees says the greatest scam perpetrated on mankind is currency debasement -- and that crypto will change all that. In this wide-ranging interview, the CEO of crypto-to-crypto exchange Shapeshift talks about how crypto will take away power from central banks, why he believes "maximalists" -- those who believe one crypto asset will rule them all -- are wrong, and why someday we will look ba...

Love Unchained? Please take this extremely brief survey to help us find more sponsors: https://survey.libsyn.com/unchained Growing up in Argentina, Wences Casares saw his family lose all their money three times due to actions by the government. The so-called "patient zero" of Bitcoin in Silicon Valley explains why he believes that experience predisposed him to seeing the potential in Bitcoin earli...