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.

Hi everyone. My guest today is Sebastian Manhart. He is the senior policy adviser at Carbonfuture, which is a technology company building an operating system for high quality carbon removals.

Sebastian has a super interesting background of over a decade of entrepreneurship and an advisory role with the German government on decentralized identity. His move into climate-tech and more specifically carbon removals is a result of his passion for this space.

Sebastian and I had an eye-opening conversation on how governments view frontier technologies, state of the play for carbon removal policy globally, range of technologies for high quality carbon removals and of course what Carbonfuture is building in this exciting space.

Here are some of the topics that we discussed:

Technology vs Policy. How do these two work together?

How do governments and policy makers view frontier technologies?

In what practical ways do you help founding teams? How much of a difference does being proactive make?

What was your transition from advising on crypto to climate-tech?

What is your take on the climate-tech space from a policy perspective? And how does it differ across regions?

What does carbon removal actually mean?

What is high-quality carbon removal?

What doe Carbonfuture do?

What carbon removal technology does Carbonfuture currently focus on?

What made you get attracted to Carbonfuture over bunch of other companies in this space?

How do you get new suppliers onto the platform?

How about buyers of carbon credits? What attracts them to Carbonfuture?

What is the northstar metric at Carbonfuture?

What is missing in carbon removal markets? What is your agenda for 2023?

What are you most #curious about these days and what are you doing to #learn more about it?

Super excited to have Peter Grosskopf on the first episode of the second season. Peter is the co-founder and CTO of Ultimate Money (core product of Unstoppable Finance), which is one of the most exciting DeFi products out there.  His background is unique coming into crypto from a combination of software development and fintech building / operating and incubating. Peter and I had a great conversation about what happened in crypto in 2022, future of DeFi and where Ultimate Money is positioned in that future.

What is a good summary of 2022?
It was a special year. DeFi has proven to be more stable compared to CeFi given the robust performance of infrastructure while we have seen CeFi institutions crashed one after another.

How do you see the path to recovery of crypto markets?
Long-term believers and those who have seen these cycles before are optimistic despite the recent events.  Yet, the noise in the market due to the ongoing CeFi situation (e.g. Gemini x DCG) needs to go away, so that we focus again on the fundamentals. What happened has nothing to do with the original intention of Satoshi and all the builders of crypto.

The usability needs to be improved and it needs to be super easy to use self-custody. For everyday users to use crypto safely, account abstraction and multi-party computation would ensure privacy and compliance at the same time.

How do you define Ultimate Money?
We started Unstoppable Finance, the company and Ultimate Money, the main product to solve the core issue of DeFi, which is usability. We help users trade easily on DEXes and tap into blue chip DeFi protocols.

Who are your users?
We strive to bring new users into DeFi. Globally there are only 2 million DeFi users, which is tiny compared to traditional finance. Next to those, we aim to give  sophisticated users a better experience in  DEX trading by providing professional tooling in the future.

What matters to your users most? How do they engage with the Ultimate Money app so far?
Better mobile experience and frictionless access to DeFi protocols.  They mostly engage with trading these days. And given the increasing interest rate environment, yield farming related activities are not very active in crypto.

What brought you into DeFi?
I have always been super curious about new things and that is what made me move into fintech and banking in the first place.  My move into crypto was driven by this goal of automating as many processes as we could in finance. Then I met blockchain and smart contract, which was revolutionary to achieve 100% automation in financial services.

How do 'your keys, your coins' and 'regulation' co-exist?
It is a matter of properly defining roles and responsibilities of the players in the market. I don't believe that regulation is completely stupid and its scope needs to be defined properly. One important role of it should be to ensure fair markets for entrepreneurs and for users.

How important is MiCA for crypto markets in Europe?
MiCA is a regulation for centralized finance and for centralized exchanges.  It doesn't have much to do with DeFi.  It is our responsibility as the crypto community to speak to regulators to explain the opportunity in DeFi.

What would be a positive surprise for you in 2023 in terms of market developments?
In the first half of the year there might be more negative surprises. On the positive side, it would be politicians and decision makers fully understanding the true potential of DeFi and contributing to the efforts of building a global infrastructure.

What are you most #curious about these days and what are you doing to #learn more about it?
Still learning a lot about crypto everyday!

Hi everyone. My guest today is James West. He is the CEO of Globe, which is a crypto futures exchange. James and I agreed to talk about building a crypto exchange a while back and we kept rescheduling since then. Finally, by coincidence, we happened to record the episode on the day FTX filed for bankruptcy!

We talked about James' take on what really happened at FTX , its impact on confidence in crypto markets and of course what he is building at Globe.

Here are some highlights from the show.

- What did really happen at FTX? In one sentence?
They were gambling with customer deposits. But didn't expect them to have that much leverage, which created a big hole on the books.

- Are we now in an extended crypto winter? 2-year timeframe?
It will certainly make a big hit in confidence. As for the timeframe, I actually get bullish when everyone else thinks 2-year. It will be shorter.

- What was your entrance into crypto?
I come from math background. Did research during PhD on a variety of fields including physics, machine learning and biostatistics. After publishing 8 papers in a year, moved into investing. And finally got interested in crypto in 2017-2018.

- How did you approach building Globe?
Initially thought of building a market maker for an exchange with perps. However, after seeing the the way that exchange was working, decided to build a better one , hence Globe. It was mostly foreseeing a future with more sophisticated trading.

- What are the key building blocks of a crypto exchange?
Fundamental elements are of course liquidity, usability, range of products, compliance. But, dealing with the initial liquidity / bootstrapping that is one of the biggest challenges. Critical to have your own engineering team vs. white-label product, because in the latter you can't innovate.

- What is a snapshot of Globe today?
150 thousand customers. Total traded to date around $10 billion. Geography mix had been impacted by the China ban, but now they are coming back. Profitable pretty much since the launch. Earlier did institutional asset management services and we were at some point the biggest defi yield farming protocol for Silicon Valley.

- What metrics do you follow most closely?
We obviously follow all the classic metrics in terms of conversion, trading, active users, etc. But the most important to me is getting an email from a customer who says they really like the product.

- What is the most important product that you are focused on?
Mobile is a big focus for us. Working on the Android launch.

- What needs to happen in crypto for a more visible and brighter future?
I think it already has a brighter future. For example, stablecoins solve real problems. Though one challenge there could be the introduction of central bank digital currencies.

- What are you most curious about these days?
Generative AI! No, no angle of it in crypto for now :)

My guest today is Chris Perkins. He is the President of CoinFund, which is a crypto-native investment firm founded in 2015. Chris joined CoinFund in 2021 after spending a long time in traditional finance. He was most recently a managing director at CitiGroup.

His experience in traditional finance is very relevant from the perspective of crypto's future as an industry. Chris was deeply involved at the time in the transition of the traditional finance derivatives industry from unregulated to regulated. That transition is now top of mind for the crypto industry. 

I have previously discussed with other guests the topic of mass adoption of crypto. And this time, I thoroughly enjoyed the holistic conversation with Chris where we touched on regulation, usability and functionality of crypto.

Below some highlights from the show:

- How do you see the current landscape for crypto?

There are medium and long-term tailwinds specific to crypto:

1) ongoing regulatory de-risking (of course compared to a few years ago) and policy work to provide uncertainty to founders and to the ecosystem

2) institutions getting more comfort with crypto, including a wide range of companies from asset managers to consumer brands

3) strong pace of innovation continues alongside move of talent from web2 to web3

- Regulatory progress vs technological progress? Is the former lagging behind the latter?

Maybe. But not a big problem as some other instances in the history, technology has surpassed law and regulation. It is important for industry participants to invest in the dialogue and education with the policy makers.

- Is Cryptocurrency a security or a commodity?

Obviously, a very challenging question. It shouldn't matter as to who regulates the space (SEC in the case of security or CFTC in the case of commodity). It should be about focusing on underlying principles including preventing things such as manipulation, fraud and abuse.

- What excites you the most among CoinFund's areas of investments?

Excited across all verticals:

Infrastructure: huge potential to significantly improve  onboarding and user experience
NFTs: you can put anything that is non-fungible online for value
DAOs: another example, where technology has surpassed regulation
DeFi: use case will be massive as we solve the regulatory and licensing challenges
Gaming: next generation gaming with enhanced user experience coupled with blockchain technology will unlock value across the space

- What is your interpretation of DeFi? Happy with what it has achieved so far?

It will change the financial world and lead to much more inclusion. However, we need to solve certain things to make that happen, including AML/KYC, sanctions, risk management and licensing regime. This will help make DeFi widespread among a much larger retail base and institutions. 

- How do we practically execute the DeFi Mullet thesis, i.e. DeFi running the back-end systems of financial services with traditional fintech on the front-end?

Understand as a founder what you are solving for, e.g. if trying to maximize liquidity, you have to understand what regulation you need to  deal with.

- If everything goes to plan, what will be the biggest transformation in crypto in the next year and in the next five years?

In the next five years, every company will be a crypto company. In the near-term, excited about the derivative landscape (working closely with the regulator) and stablecoins.

- What are you most #curious about these days and what are you doing to #learn more about it?

Often meet amazing founders who are building super exciting projects - hence curious to hear about them across all verticals.

Hi everyone. My guest is Kevin Zhang. He is the co-founder of DFX Finance, a decentralized exchange protocol specifically for stablecoins. Kevin has been in crypto for a long time and his journey into building DFX Finance is not a coincidence.  Following his time at Consensys, he went on to build Paytrie, which is a stablecoin exchange based in Canada. In fact, it was this experience that made him see the need for a decentralized exchange designed for stablecoins.

Here are some highlights from our discussion on this episode:

Why is stablecoin a killer product in crypto?

It is agnostic to market cycles. Many use cases such as remittances, trading and store of value on-chain. It will always have utility.

Privately issued stablecoins vs  CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currency)?

Interoperability and fungibility of privately issued stablecoins are the biggest differences to CBDCs. If CBDCs do not have this functionality, they might end up being solely domestic exchange of money.

How does DFX Finance work better than any other DEX for Stablecoins?

DFX Finance uses oracles to pull real-world price data into the algorithm, which allows DFX to concentrate liquidity at that price point. This results in higher efficiency and lower slippage.

Right analogy for DFX Finance in traditional finance?

It is FX market, however without leveraged trading, which is in progress. Current spot market operations allows for highly efficient remittance corridors, where people can convert one fiat currency into another using stablecoins in the middle.

Stablecoins market cap and trading volume grew substantially, however still tiny compared to traditional FX. What does it take to close the gap?

Blockchain broadly is super efficient settlement layer for global financial services.  A combination of fiat currency in the front-end and stablecoins in the back-end would be very powerful. It would help achieve a much larger market cap and trading volume.

Are we in a Crypto winter?

Probably yes, but the worst is over. This time it must be shorter duration.

Best case macro scenario for DFX Finance? What is the plan?

More and more private stablecoin issuers. DFX wants to be the FX provider to traditional fintech applications in web2 and crypto companies.

What are you most #curious about these days and what are you doing to #learn more about it?

Super curious about the last mile problem in payment, i.e. conversion from crypto to cash.

Please enjoy my discussion with Kevin Zhang.