The massive success of the recently approved spot Bitcoin ETF showed tremendous interest from large institutional players. Even despite negative takes in public appearances, behind the curtain, more and more ‘smart money’ accumulate $BTC, either directly or through ETF shares. The same is to be expected for Ethereum, yet uncertainty still looms due to its proof-of-stake consensus model and, ultimately, staking yield. While crypto natives quickly embraced both ETH staking as well as liquid staking, institutions could not justify the higher risk profile and lack of regulatory compliance. Alluvial and Liquid Collective seek to change this and provide ultrasound infrastructure for enterprise-grade security in liquid staking. 

Topics covered in this episode:

• Mara’s background
• ETH 2.0 and the current staking landscape
• Liquid Collective
• ETH ETF and staking concerns
• The risks of adjusting staking emissions
• Restaking and new opportunities
• Institutional staking and risk optimization

Episode links:

• Mara Schmiedt on Twitter
• Alluvial on Twitter
• Liquid Collective on Twitter

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
• Chorus1: Chorus1 is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Felix Lutsch.

5 years, 20 Grants, 3715 projects crowd-funded and over $60M raised towards public goods funding, from 4.2M unique donations. Gitcoin’s headline numbers are indicative of the massive success their quadratic funding (QF) and public goods funding models (PGF) have seen over the years. With Gitcoin 2.0, crowd-funding is further decentralised, Allo Protocol being open-source and permissionless: any ecosystem treasury can create their own Gitcoin Grants program to help their community fund what matters to them.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Kevin’s background and Gitcoin’s journey so far
• The utility of Gitcoin Passport
• Gitcoin Grants sybil protection dilemma
• Public goods & capital allocation
• Quadratic funding (QF) & retroactive public goods funding (RPGF)
• New allocation models introduced by Gitcoin 2.0
• $GTC token utility & decentralising Allo Protocol
• The current landscape of DAOs

Episode links:

• Kevin Owocki on Twitter
• Gitcoin on Twitter
• Gitcoin Governance Forums

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
• Chorus1: Chorus1 is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.

The initial scaling roadmap for Ethereum featured execution layer sharding. However, the rapid advancements of layer 2 scaling solutions in general, and zero knowledge proofs in particular, caused a restructuring of the original plan. The reason was that rollups would have required less changes made to Ethereum’s base layer, hence lower risks. On the other hand, Near Protocol was designed from the ground up as a sharded system, capable of withstanding billions of transactions simultaneously, without sacrificing decentralisation or security.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Illia’s & Alex’s backgrounds
• Sharding and blockchain scalability
• Challenges of building a sharded blockchain
• Near namespace
• Shard security & validator sampling
• Stateless validation and data availability
• State witnesses and chunk producers
• Block production
• Shards vs. Rollups
• How Near could further improve
• Leaderless chunk production
• Chain abstraction

Episode links:

• Illia Polosukhin on Twitter
• Alex Skidanov on Twitter
• Near Protocol on Twitter

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
• Chorus1: Chorus1 is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Meher Roy.

Long regarded as an impending black swan, Tether has successfully weathered out the contagion and bank runs caused by Luna’s collapse in the depths of the 2022-2023 bearmarket. Since then, a large portion of Tether’s reserves has been shifted to treasury bills, which are the closest dollar proxy, positioning Tether among the top 20 holders of T-bills, worldwide. However, navigating the Tether FUD was not the first rodeo for Paolo Ardoino, as he has also previously led Bitfinex, which successfully recovered after a $72M hack, back in 2016. The worldwide adoption of USDT, especially in emerging markets and developing economies, serves as a testament to Tether’s commitment to create a product with tangible real-life applications.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Paolo’s background
• How Bitfinex succeeded
• DEX vs. CEX UX
• Entrepreneurship and company culture
• Founding Tether and its use cases
• Expanding Tether’s cross-chain support
• Tether’s reserves and long-term vision
• Stablecoin wars: BUSD & USDC
• Decentralized stablecoins and bank runs
• The potential of diversifying physical backing
• Holepunch & Keet - the P2P renaissance
• Incentivising P2P interactions

Episode links:

• Paolo Ardoino on Twitter
• Tether on Twitter
• Bitfinex on Twitter
• Holepunch on Twitter
• Keet on Twitter

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
• Chorus1: Chorus1 is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Friederike Ernst.

What started out as a plan to build prediction markets, Gnosis ended up building crucial Ethereum infrastructure and tooling. Safe is one of its many successes, which originated during the 2017 ICO mania, as a solution for managing the raised capital securely, via a multi-sig. Even back then, the multi-sig model was quickly adopted by the entire industry, as a gold standard for asset security. Smart accounts and ERC-4337 represent the next step towards mass-adoption, through achieving a Web2-like UX.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Lukas’ background and how Safe was founded
• Bitcoin vs. Ethereum multi-sigs
• Smart accounts & ERC-4337
• Safe’s design phylosohpy
• Safe CORE, SDK & API
• Safe wallet UX
• Expanding cross-chain support
• Safe account recovery
• OpSec
• Safe’s smart contract security
• Gnosis ecosystem evolution

Episode links:

• Lucas Schor on Twitter
• Safe on Twitter
• Gnosis DAO on Twitter
• Gnosis Chain on Twitter
• Gnosis Pay on Twitter

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
• Chorus1: Chorus1 is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture.

One of the most important hurdles to mass adoption is represented by blockchain scalability, which also hinders the real-life utility of its numerous applications. While there are different solutions being experimented with, one should not overlook the importance of security and decentralisation. Saga introduces the concept of chainlets, interoperable Cosmos-based sovereign blockchains that share the security of Saga’s mainnet validator set. The majority of their parameters are fully customisable, allowing developers to tweak them towards their own needs. Saga’s main focus is building their very own Web3 gaming ecosystem, providing game devs the scaling needed to unlock their full potential and creativity.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Rebecca’s background and Saga overview
• ‘Infinite’ horizontal scalability
• Saga chainlets and their focus on blockchain gaming
• Saga validators and fee model
• Building a gaming ecosystem. UGC
• Validator & infrastructure challenges
• Saga mainnet rollout
• $SAGA token launch and airdrop
• Takeaways

Episode links:

• Rebecca Liao on Twitter
• Saga on Twitter

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
• Chorus1: Chorus1 is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Felix Lutsch.

Classical, monolithic blockchains are inherently limited in their throughput due to their single-thread execution architecture. Modern VMs attempt to solve this issue through parallelisation being implemented from the get-go. Movement Labs employs the Move-VM to build a ZK L2 rollups on Ethereum, thus also deriving its security. Through parallel execution threads, Movement achieves a theoretical TPS of 160,000 while also ensuring sub-cent transaction fees.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Impressions from ETH Denver
• Rushi’s background
• Move vs. Solidity
• EVM compatibility
• Parallelisation vs. intent-based transactions
• Security and parallel state transitions
• Transitioning from EVM to newer VMs
• Berachain’s approach to EVM-compatibility
• Movement Labs’ tech stack
• Decentralising the sequencer
• Movement’s M1 and M2 chains
• Celestia DA and the Dencun upgrade
• Restaking
• Bitcoin L2s
• IBC-compatibility and USDC on Movement
• Ethereum x Cosmos convergence
• dApps on Move

Episode links:

• Rushi Manche on Twitter
• Movement Labs on Twitter
• Nebular Podcast 'Ethereum x Cosmos Convergence'

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
• Chorus1: Chorus1 is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst.

Market makers help create more efficient markets and liquid order books, by positioning themselves on the receiving end of a trade that other market participants are unwilling to fill. Quantitative analysis is crucial in determining their position and size. Wintermute defines itself as a tech-first company that also became one of the largest spot market making firms in Web3. From angel investing in Web2, to market making in Web3, Yoann Turpin (co-founder of Wintermute) has a vast experience in both tech products & financial markets. He shares what differentiates good traders and how he approaches investing, trading and market making.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Yoann’s background and his interest in trading
• The ever-changing trading landscape
• Wintermute’s genesis
• Trading vs. Investing vs. Market Making
• What defines a good trader
• On-chain trading vs. CEX trading
• How Wintermute succeeded
• Wintermute culture
• rsync blockbuilder
• Longterm predictions
• AI impact
• Misc. Learning new languages

Episode links:

• Yoann Turpin on Twitter
• Wintermute on Twitter

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
• Chorus1: Chorus1 is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.

Credit is a widely used term, which could essentially be summarised as “more capital so you can do whatever you want”. In DeFi, there are numerous ways of getting exposure to an asset in a leveraged manner: from looping to perpetuals and margin trading, the possibilities are endless (especially when you also account for synthetic versions). Gearbox Protocol aims to create a universal, composable, on-chain ‘credit layer’, through credit account abstraction. This approach simultaneously addresses three concerns: liquidity, security and, ultimately, user experience (UX).

Topics covered in this episode:

• Mikael’s and Ivan’s backgrounds
• Composable leverage explained
• Leveraged staking
• Gearbox credit account
• Managing smart contract risk
• Quotas and rate limits
• Leveraged restaking
• Governance and safety parameters
• Scaling Gearbox
• Fee structure

Episode links:

• Mikael Lazarev on Twitter
• Ivan on Twitter
• Gearbox Protocol on Twitter

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
• Chorus1: Chorus1 is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Meher Roy.

While large language models (LLMs) are rather passive from an economic perspective on their own, AI agents offer a preview of what truly autonomous AI applications can achieve. Fetch.ai aims to create a platform for economic interactions in the AI economy, where participants can provide many different kinds of stake, ranging from purely financial, in the form of cryptocurrency tokens, to utility based, in the form of data sets that LLMs can be trained on. It thus creates a supply chain that links different actors of the AI economy.

We were joined by Humayun Sheikh, co-founder & CEO of Fetch.ai, to discuss AI economic models and how LLMs can be integrated by agentic systems as a foundation for autonomous AI apps.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Humayun’s background
• Founding Fetch.ai
• Multi-agent systems
• Autonomous economic agent
• Building a Cosmos based blockchain
• Integrating ML with agent economy
• Scalability & interoperability
• Use cases & partnerships
• AI x crypto projects
• Incentivising developers
• AI alignment problem
• Fetch AI roadmap
• The future of ML & LLMs

Episode links:

• Humayun Sheikh on Twitter
• Fetch.ai on Twitter

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
• Chorus1: Chorus1 is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/539