Episodes

Episode 209: Liquid Staking with Lido and Chorus One

This week Anna and Tarun chat with Vasiliy Shapovalov from Lido and Felix Lutsch of Chorus One about liquid staking on the ETH2 Proof of Stake consensus chain. Vasiliy explains Ethereum’s unique PoS validator setup and how liquid staking behaves on this network. They also talk about how liquid staking behaves on other live PoS, the inevitability of liquid staking and how to best design these systems. Lastly, they chat about navigating control and decision making in liquid staking protocols, touching on topics of decentralisation and governance.

Episode 208: Digging into Data Availability with Ismail Khoffi from Celestia

This week Anna chats with Ismail Khoffi from Celestia about how and why they’re focusing on building a data availability-first L1 blockchain. Ismail takes us through how data availability can be a problem, primarily with light clients and breaks down the components necessary to understanding the data availability problem such as state changes, the separation of consensus from execution and how Celestia aims to be a pluggable consensus layer.

Episode 207: Journey Through the Cosmos Ecosystem with Billy Rennekamp

This week, Anna chats with Billy Rennekamp about the Cosmos Hub ecosystem, ICF and some of the latest innovations he is watching. They discuss his early experiments with NFTs that led to the Clovers Network and his move into the Cosmos ecosystem. Through this, they cover how the space has evolved and the game changing potential of the IBC paradigm. Billy explains how the Cosmos Hub aims to support innovative modular development and shares the latest research into Interchain security, bridges, governance and much more.

Episode 206: Distilling DeFi Primitives with Guillermo, Alex and Tarun

This week, Anna catches up with Guillermo Angeris, Alex Evans and Tarun. The conversation charts their research on CFMMs, AMMs and related primitives and explores the goals and methodology of this work. They also revisit the topic of private AMMs and specifically their recent work on using differential privacy to achieve a more private system.

Episode 205: Curating JPEGs with JPG

This week, Anna and Tarun chat with MP, Trent and Sam from JPG about this on-chain NFT curation protocol. They walk through what the JPG team wanted out of this decentralized curation protocol and how to bring in voices that aren’t always heard in the traditional art world. They also explore the idea of rethinking the mechanism of curation, indexing and permissionless access in order to bring a crypto native approach to NFT art culture.

Episode 204: Keeping Up with the Kusama Network

This week, Anna catches up on what has been happening in the Kusama network ecosystem with Will Pankiewicz, Raul Romanutti, and Bruno Skvorc. First up, Will, the Master of Validators at Parity, takes us through the fundamentals of Kusama, how it differs from Polkadot and some future predictions for the ecosystem and its parachains. Next, Raul, Community Manager and council member, breaks down how Kusama’s governance and council functions. Last but not least, we learn about RMRK founded by Bruno, an NFT project on Kusama which started as a hack to support basic NFTs without smart contracts and grew into full-blown NFT ecosystem on Kusama.

Episode 203: MPC and DAGs with Aleph Zero’s Adam Gagol & Matthew Niemerg

This week Anna speaks with Adam Gągol and Matthew Niemerg about Aleph Zero – an L1 project mixing ZKPs and MPCs with a DAG consensus algorithm. They explore their underlying DAG structure and their privacy solutions that leverage zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs) and Secure Multiparty Computation (sMPC).

Episode 202: Stateless Ethereum & Verkle Tries with Dankrad Feist

This week, Anna speaks with Dankrad Feist, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation. They talk about the future of the ETH client infrastructure, the Merge, Verkle Tries, and more. They also explore how concepts that originated in the ZK research space have made their way into the ETH client stack.

Episode 201: DeFi’s Multichain Future with Zaki Manian from Sommelier

This week, Anna catches up with Zaki Manian and his new project Sommelier. They explore how Sommelier aims to develop strategies to better serve the more complex emerging DeFi projects like Uniswap V3, and how this would allow the average user to benefit from these new powerful tools. They also discuss Zaki’s vision for multichain DeFi and how the space has evolved over the last few years.

Episode 200: SNARK Research & Pedagogy with Alessandro Chiesa

This week, in our 200th episode (!), Anna chats with Alessandro Chiesa, a professor working on cryptography, complexity and security. Anna and Ale dig into some of the recent SNARK research coming out of his lab and discuss how to navigate the challenges of teaching in a space that changes quickly.

Episode 199: Snapps on Mina with Emre and Izaak

In this week’s episode, Anna chats with Emre Tekişalp and Izaak Meckler about what’s new with Mina, O(1) Labs, the network launch and the anticipated release of Snapps to testnet later this year. We learn more about how Snapps – these SNARK-powered applications are the bridge between real world data that can be represented cryptographically – think https for the blockchain.

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