Hi everyone. My guest today is Mert Mumtaz. He is the co-founder and CEO at Helius, which is a developer platform for the Blockchain ecosystem. Mert is not new to crypto. Prior to starting Helius, he spent years at Coinbase building different products across payments and others. Helius currently supports the Solana ecosystem and Mert has been a big supporter of the ecosystem since its early days.

Mert and I had a fascinating discussion about the state of Blockchain, Solana vs. other networks, upcoming L1 ecosystems and of course his plans for Helius. Below are some highlights of the episode. Please give it a listen to hear a great conversation.

Where does your conviction for Solana come from?
Its unique tech aspect, its different approach to Blockchain design and scaling and of course the strong developer community.

What is your view on use cases of Blockchain?
Payments is an obvious use case and what Blockchain offers is a 10x improvement over traditional wire systems.  Another big area is token incentivized physical infrastructure network with examples in wireless networks, maps, energy grid, etc.

What is a one-liner for Helius?
Helius enables developers to build crypto powered applications in a frictionless way.

What is the problem that Helius solves for builders?
For any software development process, there is naturally a gap between having an idea to build something and actually executing it. In crypto, that gap is wider and is full of frictions due to additional complexity around models of Blockchains, RPC nodes, etc. Helius shortens the gap and bridges ideas to execution.

How did the experience at Coinbase lead to realisation of the need for a product like Helius?
It was a natural conclusion during the Solana expansion of Coinbase. Many of the resources available for the Ethereum ecosystem (e.g. Etherscan, APIs, etc.) didn't exist for Solana, which I was working to build at Coinbase.

What is the mix of projects on Solana?
Payments is a big space and developing fast. Intersection of NFTs and DeFi is also interesting. This is in particular due to compression, which is a tool that enables to mint large number of NFTs at minimal cost. The one I am most interested is physical infrastructure networks.

What is your expansion plan at Helius in terms of other Blockchain networks?
Our vision at Helius is to build specialized infrastructure for high throughput and scalable L1 networks. Solana is the most scalable one and we will expand to others.

What new products are on the way?
Three that I can disclose: 1) Blockchain explorer called X-Ray, which makes it super easy to read and make sense of transactions on Blockchain. 2) RPC 2.0, which re-designs the archiving system on the back-end. 3) A new product called Geyser VM that allows streaming data directly from the validator by using Geyser plugins.

Where does transformation come from in crypto in the next 3-5 years?
Payments is the killer app for crypto. Crypto is a much better way of facilitating payments and the problem is regulatory uncertainty around stablecoins and the differences in the regulatory environment across regions will determine how geographically distributed it will be. Others are physical infrastructure networks as mentioned and decentralized infrastructure (e.g. storage).

What are you most curious about?
1) Chat GPT - mind blowing how impressive it is! -> Stephen Wolfram's article
2) How data centers work and whether there is a way to improve the industry (hint: using Blockchain)
3) Storytelling! -> As engineers, you often neglect something like storytelling, but have been trying to improve that skill.




 

Hi everyone. My guest at The Curious Learners is Amos Wittenberg. He is the co-founder of Dovetail. Amos and his co-founder Phillip Marks are building the climate risk modelling toolkit for investors. Dovetail helps to identify and quantify risks and opportunities in the era of climate transition.

What Dovetail is building is critical for institutional investors' workflows, investment strategies and decision making. And it goes beyond climate-tech investors of course. Take Oil and Gas as an example. Investors need to take into account the exposure of Oil and Gas companies to stranded assets, to climate-related taxes and levies, as well as the knock on effect of transitions in other industries (e.g., EVs reducing demand for lubricants)—and hence the potential for higher costs and lower revenues for the industry.

Amos and I had a great discussion. Here are some highlights from the episode. There is much more in the episode including how Dovetail collects inputs, the approach to integration with investors' workflow, Amos's background in journalism in financial crime and his experience at Palantir and how both led him to found Dovetail.

How do you think about the risk framework in the era of climate transition?
Climate transition is an undisputed megatrend. Over the next 30 years it will drive billions of dollars to change hands in practically every industry, regardless of how effectively we transition. All investors need to incorporate that risk in their strategy and decision making.

What does Dovetail do against that risk framework?
Dovetail provides a modelling toolkit for investors and lenders to understand both the risks and the opportunities of the transition at equity level.

What is the horizon for Dovetail's modelling approach?
It depends on the industry, however we typically model on a three to five year horizon.

What are the key building blocks of the product?
Primarily there are two sides to it: one is the systemic risks, which apply to each company relatively equally in a particular sector and geography, and the other is idiosyncratic risks, which define how each company is set up against such risks.

What is the output? Is it a scoring system?
We stay away from generalist scoring systems. Instead, our product gives investors both a high-level view of how their particular investments and overall portfolio would perform as well as tangible detailed projections (e.g., adjustments to revenue growth assumptions over the next 5 years).

How does the current pace of net-zero transition drive your projections?
The viability and economic feasibility of net-zero transition have improved. In addition, momentum is gathering in the capital stack and among regulators, driving disclosure and transition aligned investment.

What are you most #curious about and what are you doing to #learn more about it?
Green hydrogen! I went back and forth between being interested in it and sceptical. But I have gained a better understanding and am now exploring specific companies and applications developed with green hydrogen.

Please enjoy my conversation with Amos Wittenberg. 

Hi everyone. My guest at The Curious Learners is Yurii Kyparus. He is the co-founder of Wallchain, which is a start-up that addresses the issue of MEV (miner extracted value) in crypto. MEV refers to value extracted from crypto transactions. Wallchain captures this value and returns it back to users.

Here are some of the topics that we discussed on the episode:

- MEV as a problem and opportunity in crypto

- MEV across different chains

- Wallchain versus its peers in terms of technology and business model

- Wallchain's new B2C product with direct integration to wallets

- Missing element of DeFi to fulfil its purpose

- Yurii's journey from a big tech engineer to web2 founder and to web3 founder

- Wallchain's pitch to new people to join the team

- Most curious about these days? (AMMs, hint for a new product upgrade at Wallchain)

Please enjoy my conversation with Yurii Kyparus.