The Archive: Crypto, Startups, and Stories

In this episode, we sat down with Ivo, the co-founder of Pascal, a new prediction markets venue. We started off by discussing the state of prediction markets today and why existing venues are still far from the reliability, performance, and capital efficiency of mature exchanges. We also cover how prediction markets could evolve from gambling-adjacent products into tools for real risk transfer and...

Dan Guido is the co-founder and CEO of Trail of Bits, one of the most respected security research firms in crypto, government, and software infrastructure. In this episode, we trace Dan’s path from hacking his high school’s computer systems to working at the NSA, the Federal Reserve incident response team and eventually building Trail of Bits. We dive into how North Korean hackers became some of t...

Lucas is the co-founder of Jito, the leading infrastructure provider and LST provider on Solana. In this episode, we dive into how Lucas went from running MEV bots on Ethereum to betting early on Solana. We explore what drew Lucas to Solana, how Jito scaled from ~3% to ~90% validator adoption, and the hard decisions that Jito had to make around MEV on Solana. Finally, Lucas shares his perspective...

Michael Shaulov is the co-founder and CEO of Fireblocks, the leading infrastructure platform powering digital asset operations for institutions. In this episode, we trace Michael’s journey from growing up in Israel and serving in Unit 8200 to building and selling his first company, and ultimately founding Fireblocks after uncovering critical security flaws in early crypto markets. We also dive int...

Se is the co-founder of fomo, a social trading platform. In this episode, we discuss Se’s journey from Yale to dYdX, how he built product intuition, and the early insights that led to him starting fomo. We also dive into the product philosophy, why crypto UX has historically failed mainstream users, and what fomo is doing to fix this. Finally, we explore the long-term vision around the “speculatio...

John is the founder of Gauntlet, which operates institutional vaults and manages risk for major DeFi protocols. In this episode we talk about Gauntlet's evolution from risk modeling to automated on-chain vaults and why vaults are the future of on-chain finance. We also discussed the evolution of DeFi from the perspective of innovation and UX. We also spent some time discussing Gauntlet’s beef...

Ethan is the co-founder and CEO of Allium, a crypto data infrastructure company. In this episode, we talked about Ethan’s upbringing in Singapore and how his military experience shaped his leadership style. We also cover his transition from AI to crypto, the early days of building Allium, and what raising capital after the Terra/Luna collapse was like. Lastly, we spent some time digging into why d...

Keone Hon is the founder of Monad, a high performance blockchain aiming to scale the EVM. In this episode, we dive into Keone’s upbringing and how that’s influenced him over the years. We also discuss the early days of Monad, his experience raising the seed round, and how Keone's recruiting philosophy. Plus, we get an inside look at Keone’s day-to-day and his vision for Monad’s future. ----- A...