DeFi and staking are classified as two different animals. And yet, both facilitate a protocol-level interaction with a smart contract that pays a yield over time. For that reason, Tim Ogilvie and the team at Staked are playing in both arenas, helping customers put their idle crypto to use. Tim is the Cofounder and CEO of Staked, a crypto platform t…

Imagine having the capacity to build a website that only you can put up or take down. A website that doesn’t require you to answer to any government or powerful company. A truly censorship-resistant website created on a decentralized registry. Brad Kam is the Cofounder and Head of Business Development at Unstoppable Domains, a blockchain startup th…

Scalability. Interoperability. Liquidity. Any number of projects in the crypto space are working to tackle these problems. But just one is solving for all three at the same time and leveraging cashflow incentives to encourage participation in the network. Varun Vruddhula is the Founder of Hashflow Network and Lawson Baker serves as an Advisor and A…

Here at Wyre, we’re in a unique market position, serving as a bridge from the traditional payments ecosystem to the Wild West that is cryptocurrency. And we spend a lot of time on the podcast getting granular about innovative crypto projects and blockchain technology, but we have yet to focus our attention exclusively on the payments space. Until t…

It’s no surprise that Joey Krug is a fan of taking calculated risks. After all, he was betting on horse races (and winning) in middle school and eventually created a mechanism for making bets on the blockchain. As an early crypto developer, Joey had the opportunity to meet a lot of promising entrepreneurs. And ultimately, he put together a syndicat…

GNOSIS is a pioneer in the Ethereum ecosystem, creating the first implementation of both the multisig and smart contract wallets. Their pivotal technology served as the backbone for many ICOs, and the GNOSIS team was the first to leverage the Dutch auction for trading. So, how did the team at GNOSIS become trailblazers in the crypto space? And how …

If you ask Lasse Clausen, tokenized networks are better than free. And that’s why he has created a crypto investment fund around a token maximalist philosophy. A fund that capitalizes on permissionless innovation and declining trust in companies and governments. The 1kx thesis is flexible enough to adapt to the fast-moving blockchain space yet focu…

The most powerful financial tools available live on the blockchain. The problem is, only crypto aficionados currently have access to these decentralized financial protocols like Kyber, Uniswap, Maker, and Compound. So, how can we serve the investing, trading and borrowing needs of non-crypto users, abstracting the complexities of the blockchain to …

It goes without saying that DeFi is better with Bitcoin as collateral. And there is an appetite among BTC holders for ways to actively apply our money. But as of yet, there is no way to bring Bitcoin onto Ethereum that is censorship-resistant and adheres to the #1 principle of BTC: No printing money. Until now. The newly formed Cross-Chain Group is…

Crypto is a different animal. Investors who play in the blockchain space are putting their money on a science experiment rather than a company with a business plan. And the pace and complexity of the ecosystem make it impossible to have a depth of knowledge in any one area. So, the best crypto venture investors can do is secure a broad understandin…

The creators of Perlin still hold the long-term vision of developing a revenue-generating distributed ledger system that closes the wealth gap. But until smartphones are powerful enough and broadband speeds are fast enough, the team has expanded its scope to include Wavelet, a DAG ledger that powers WebAssembly smart contracts. Kenta Iwasaki and Do…

The ZRX token was created to facilitate governance for 0x as a public piece of infrastructure. It gave the community voting rights and was baked into the settlement layer as a way to collect fees. The idea was to get the token into the hands of the platform’s users. But soon after launch, the team realized their hypothesis was wrong, and they have …

Today, we're looking back at the first six months of 2019 to review the most important developments in crypto. We start with the launch of LIBRA, discussing its ambition to own the financial infrastructure in the developing world. We introduce the evolving narrative around Bitcoin and explore what's behind BTC price action, including the trade war …

How do you develop a venture fund that invests in future tech like jetpacks and exoskeletons? According to Adam Draper, you start by branding yourself as the VC interested in ‘anything that gets me closer to an Ironman suit.’ This attracts the demented builders and deal flow of wild things you need to realize your sci-fi vision of a world without b…

Seth Rubin is the cofounder and CEO of MARKET Protocol, a framework for creating synthetic assets represented as tokens that allows users to gain exposure to a variety of assets without leaving the Ethereum network. Today, he joins us to discuss the launch of the MARKET Protocol Exchange (MPX) and minting platform, explaining the role of the MKT to…

Michael Feng was looking for a problem to solve, so he spent September of 2018 talking to everyone he could in the crypto space. The notion of liquidity kept coming up, and without knowing exactly what the solution might be, he and his team set out to answer the question: How do you create the liquidity necessary to attract traders to cryptocurrenc…

John Burnett is the Cofounder and Head of Business Development and Strategy at Omniex, an institutional operating platform for investment managers and active traders focused on crypto assets. Today, he joins us to explain how Omniex is priming the crypto market for institutional entry, describing the increasing interest in the tokenization of asset…

Today, we’re joined by the cofounders of UMA, COO Allison Lu and CEO Hart Lambur. Allison and Hart explain how UMA facilitates bilateral derivatives by allowing the short side to be levered and collateralizing the long side at 100%, and they describe how the tokenized derivative smart contract serves as the protocol’s core technology. They go on to…

Crypto wallets come in a variety of shapes and sizes. What the team stands for has an influence on who they serve, what services they offer, and how they address security. The architecture of the wallet itself is, in fact, shaped by each project’s core values. Curious how the co-founders of three very distinct wallets make decisions based on their …

Hayden Adams is the founder of Uniswap, the decentralized exchange that affords users a simple smart contract interface for trading ERC-20 tokens, a formalized model for pooling liquidity reserves, and an open-source front-end for traders and liquidity providers. Today, Hayden joins us to offer insight around the design tradeoffs he considered in b…

Anatoly Yakovenko is the co-founder and CEO of Solana, a venture to rebuild the blockchain for scale. The Solana team is designing new architecture focused on high throughput with the goal of facilitating up to 700K transactions per second on a 1Gb network—without data partitioning. Today, Anatoly joins us to discuss how his background in distribut…

Felix Feng is the CEO and Inje Yeo is the CPO of Set Protocol, the first functional asset-management protocol on the Ethereum blockchain. The team’s ultimate goal lies in bringing wealth-creation tools to a global user base. Today, Felix and Inje join us to discuss the flexibility of the Set architecture to add functionality over time and explain h…

Today, we’re looking back on Q1 to explore the most important headlines in crypto. We start with a discussion of Facebook’s motivation to enter the space and how the introduction of ZuckBucks might impact the ecosystem as a whole. Michael shares his take on the Bitwise report, explaining why it doesn’t answer the right question and describing the S…

By definition, margin lending is not fully collateralized. Some sort of mechanism is necessary to ensure that lenders receive their full principal, with interest, even under unforeseen circumstances. In crypto, one way to handle this is with tokens. So, what would that look like? Why are some margin lending protocols proposing a kind of ‘insurance …

Of the 7.5 billion people in the world, 40 million have used cryptocurrency. 2 million possess non-custodial service wallets, but only tens of thousands are engaged in using DeFi services, specifically. So, how do we get more people interested in decentralized finance? Will there be one principal entry point to the ecosystem or many? And how do we …

Andy Bromberg is the Cofounder and President at CoinList, the trusted resource for digital asset companies to manage their token sales, airdrops and online hackathons. Andy was also a founding research scientist at the Stanford Bitcoin Group. Today, he joins us to explain how the idea for CoinList came out of a collaboration between Protocol Labs a…

Loong Wang is the CTO of Ren, a project working to create an ecosystem for unstoppable privacy. The protocol allows users to transfer tokens in zero-knowledge, trustlessly swap between blockchains, and trade on a dark pool. Today, Loong joins us to explain how the need for a decentralized financial infrastructure inspired the launch of Ren and disc…

Rune is the cofounder and CEO of MakerDAO, the originator of Dai, the world’s first stablecoin built on the Ethereum blockchain. Dai serves to eliminate volatility through a system of smart contracts designed to respond to market dynamics. Today, Rune joins us to discuss the imminent launch of Multi-Collateral Dai, explaining how the team overcame …

Nadav is the Founder and Project Lead at Dharma, a decentralized protocol for globally accessible lending products built on Ethereum. Today, he joins us to discuss the current audience for the Dharma Lever product and share his long-term ambitions for the platform. Nadav explains how he thinks about the problem of unsecured lending on the blockchai…

James Prestwich and Matthew Hammond are two of the three cofounders of Summa, a startup working to provide high-impact financial tools for the new economy. At present, the team is leveraging their expertise in blockchain architecture to create contracts that link assets across chains. Today, James and Matthew join us to share Summa’s mission to emp…

Devin Finzer is the co-founder of OpenSea, the world’s largest digital marketplace for crypto collectibles. He graduated from Brown in 2013 and worked as a software engineer at Pinterest before getting into the startup space. Devin’s finance app, ClaimDog, was acquired by Credit Karma in 2016, and he started working on OpenSea at the end of 2017. T…

We’ve come a long way, baby. In fact, it’s mindboggling to consider the progress cryptocurrency has made, as an industry, since the introduction of Bitcoin in 2009. But we’re still a long way from mass adoption. So, how can improvements in UX lower the barrier to entry? Who are the players working to push crypto adoption forward? And what potential…

Today, Evan joins us to discuss the immense resources required to verify cryptocurrency and how Coda is tackling the problem. He shares the fundamentals of Coda Protocol and its side project, Snarky, explaining why they use functional programming and how the team is dealing with scalability constraints. Follow Evan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/e…

David Bleznak is the founder and CEO of Totle, the world’s first on-chain order routing solution. By aggregating the liquidity of the top decentralized exchanges, Totle’s software solution makes crypto investing and asset management easy. David began his career investing in the real estate space before developing an interest in crypto in general an…

Ryón Nixon is General Counsel at MyCrypto and Founding Partner of Horizons Law & Consulting Group, a boutique crypto and blockchain corporate and litigation law firm. Ryón’s interest in working with startups led him to Boost VC, where his exposure to entrepreneurs in the blockchain space afforded the opportunity to build a pivotal business relation…

Today, Alex joins us to discuss Aurora’s mission to recreate the financial stack through a hybrid decentralized exchange and the company’s plans to decentralize over time. We ask Alex about AURA staking, and he speaks to the current return for running a node. He also offers insight around why IDEX has succeeded where VC-backed market darlings have …

In this Wyre Talks, we are excited to host Steven Becker COO and President of MakerDAO. Having spent his career at various trading desks on Wall Street banks and high stakes hedge funds, Steven is no stranger to managing risk. However, a new challenge arose as he was tapped to run the decentralized risk functions at MakerDAO. Steven grasped the pro…

Fetch is a wallet with trade execution capabilities. Fetch is evolving into a financial services firm by pursuing the appropriate regulations to offer securities trading to their users. This will allow them to market US securities internationally and bring international securities to US citizens. Ditch the Wall Street infrastructure and keep the mo…

What an eventful year at Wyre and in the crypto ecosystem. Outsiders will look at the price/headlines and think the whole industry is in crisis. We don’t think that’s the case at all. Infact, we welcome the negative press since it chruns the non-believers out of the space so that the true visionaries can focus on building great product. In this spe…

Less is more - keep it simple. That's the elegance of the Compound protocol. Compound has created a liquid, on-chain lending market. By keeping loan terms identical and utilizing a cohesive rate interest model, Compound has created a deep liquidity in a floating rate money market. With a long-term vision for protocol-level governance and a native m…

Overview: Josh’s trading style as it pertains to risk management, sizing, instruments, The mindset and habits of a winning trader. A profile of the early Bitcoin trading community. The impact on the derivative markets in crypto on underlying spot markets. The relationship between information asymmetry and technical analysis, the closest thing a tra…

In this episode of Wyre Talks, we're excited to have Joe Lau (cofounder & CTO) and Nikil Viswanathan (cofounder & CEO) of Alchemy, join us for the show. Alchemy, the world's leading blockchain intelligence and infrastructure company, powers the top hedge funds managing billions of dollars. In this session they share their background - how they met …

You can follow the hosts on Twitter! Thomas Scaria (host): @tomscaria Louis Aboud (co-host): @louAboudHogbenOleh Wyre

You can follow the hosts on Twitter! Thomas Scaria (host): @tomscaria Louis Aboud (co-host): @louAboudHogbenOleh Wyre

You can follow the hosts on Twitter! Thomas Scaria (host): @tomscaria Louis Aboud (co-host): @louAboudHogbenOleh Wyre

You can follow the hosts on Twitter! Thomas Scaria (host): @tomscaria Louis Aboud (co-host): @louAboudHogbenOleh Wyre

You can follow the host on Twitter! Thomas Scaria: @tomscariaOleh Wyre

You can follow the host on Twitter! Thomas Scaria: @tomscariaOleh Wyre

In this Wyre Talks, our guest is John Piotrowski, founder and CEO of The Ocean. John has a past life in political campaigning and traditional finance, but made the pivot to cryptocurrency and founded the Ocean in 2017. The Ocean provides wallet-to-wallet trading on a high performance, institution-grade, decentralized platform that provides more liq…

In this special live edition of Wyre Talks, we host Tom Schmidt, Product Manager, and Alex Xu, Director of Operations, of 0x protocol. In this episode, we discuss: Operational hurdles with setting up a decentralized project in early 2017 Why does 0x not have any partnerships? Fat protocol thesis and why open protocols are so popular What are relaye…