Podcast

Alex Ryvkin is CEO and Founder of Rho Labs, an institutional grade decentralized crypto native marketplace that allows retail and professional traders to efficiently trade swaps and futures on-chain compliantly. Alex joins us to discuss his journey in traditional finance and crypto, building the first crypto interest rates derivatives exchange, an asset class currently valued at over $500 trillion, opportunities for investors and traders given the broader risk-off sentiment, and the road ahead for Rho Labs.

Ash Arora is Investment Partner at LocalGlobe, one of the leading early stage venture capital firms in Europe, with one of the highest number of unicorns in portfolio, with companies like SoRare, Layer Zero, Robinhood, Figma, Wise, and Twitter (X). Ash, also a Strategic Partner and member of WAGMI Ventures family, leads the B2B, AI and web3 practice of LocalGlobe. She shares insights gathered over her illustrious career journey as an investor, intricacies of investing through different cycles of crypto, philosophy on evaluating winners, and investing in the current global macro market dynamics.

Bryan Pellegrino is the Co-Founder & CEO of LayerZero Labs. Backed by Sequoia, a16z, Coinbase Ventures, Uniswap Labs, & more, LayerZero is a user application (UA) configurable on-chain endpoint that runs a ULN. In this episode we discuss interesting second-orders / downstream effects if their work continues to gain traction, Bryan’s fascinating perspective on the history and future of crypto, advice for crypto founders working on hard technical problems, & much, much more.

Michael Shaulov is the Co-Founder & CEO at Fireblocks. Backed by Sequoia Capital, Coatue, Paradigm, & more, Fireblocks is a digital asset infrastructure provider, with thousands of crypto businesses building on top of its products, 170M+ wallets created, $4T+ transactions secured. In this episode we discuss the Michael’s journey to creating Fireblocks, a unified view of the various products and services Fireblocks provides, how Fireblocks navigated the bear market, a deep-dive on stablecoins (present, future), how the future of crypto might look (from Michael’s vantage point), best advice for new crypto founders, & much more.

Jon Kol is the Co-Founder @ Hyperlane. Backed by Variant, Galaxy Digital, Circle, & more, Hyperlane is the first interoperability layer that enables you to permissionlessly connect any blockchain, out-of-the-box. In this episode we discuss how his past work as an investor at Galaxy Digital helped him reach conviction on the Hyperlane opportunity, why permissionless interoperability is valuable and what it unlocks when widely distributed, how to think about team composition for a complex build, his state-of-the-union on the crypto space these days, and much more.