My guest today is my friend Andreas Kohl, Chief Business Development Officer of Mintlayer. Mintlayer is a Bitcoin sidechain dedicated to asset tokenization - like stablecoins and stock tokens - and DEX transactions, including direct atomic swap and lightning swaps between BTC and any token issued on the Mintlayer sidechain. MLT is the governance utility token that is used for: * Running blocksigner nodes on the network via staking MLT. * Fees for processing transactions, creating tokenized assets, ACL rules and smart contracts. The Mintlayer Consensus system is called DSA, a sort of refined Proof of Stake system secured by the Bitcoin Proof of Work, thanks to the mechanism of anchoring and checkpoints on the Bitcoin mainchain. Andreas is a Bitcoin maximalist, libertarian, and futurist. He is passionate about decentralization, self-determination, and maximizing human potential. Prior to joining the Bitcoin space he worked extensively within the libertarian community working for various major libertarian organizations and institutions. Our conversation centers around Bitcoin, Mintlayer, Reimagining DeFi on Bitcoin, Layer-2s and Sidechains, Bitcoin’s impact on society, and much more. Andreas does an excellent job at explaining the design trade-offs when optimizing for various engineering parameters. This naturally leads to our conversation about the unique approach Mintlayer is taking to optimize for decentralization and atomic interoperability with Bitcoin. Andreas blew me away with his knowledge about the technical challenges of building blockchains. The next part of the conversation centers around bringing DeFi to Bitcoin. Andreas explains how Mintlayer utilizes the Lightning Network to truly scale Bitcoin to be the hub for DeFi. Another very interesting conversation was how Mintlayer is gas token agnostic. We discuss the possibilities of creating ecosystems on top of Mintlayer that are able to use their own tokens to process and validate transactions without the need for any other outside token. A very important conversation topic was how DeFi can be reimagined with Bitcoin at the center. Our final conversation topic was to discuss Bitcoin’s 13th anniversary and how the space has changed but more importantly how Bitcoin has changed society in the last 13 years. Please enjoy my conversation with my friend Andreas Kohl. -- This podcast is powered by Blockworks. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at https://blockworks.co