Podcast

Tom Trowbride is CEO and Co-Founder of Fluence Labs, a decentralized, enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure with global compute. Tom dives into Fluence’s mission to reshape the future of the internet through its cloudless computing platform, offering resilient, low-cost, and open alternatives to traditional cloud services. He discusses how Fluence’s DePIN platform, governed by the Fluence DAO and powered by FLT on Ethereum, delivers cheaper decentralized compute compared to conventional providers while enhancing security, scalability, and censorship resistance. Tom shares his journey from launching Hedera Hashgraph to building Fluence Labs, addressing challenges like customer acquisition and simplifying messaging for non-crypto audiences.

Ilya Polosukhin is Co-Founder of NEAR, a high-performant, AI-native blockchain platform that provides the infrastructure needed for AI applications and agents to transact, operate, and interact across both Web2 and Web3. With a deep background in machine learning and software engineering, Ilya shares his journey into crypto, from early contributions in tech to co-founding NEAR, where he focuses on building an accessible Web3 ecosystem. He emphasizes the importance of user-centric blockchain infrastructure, the modularity of NEAR’s design, and its role as a leading stack for creating decentralized applications, empowering developers to innovate seamlessly.

Patrick O'Grady is Founder and CEO of Commonware, an open-source set of primitives that developers can use to build and reassemble their applications without resorting to a complicated fork. Patrick shares his journey into crypto, building in the early days at Coinbase and thereafter joining Ava Labs, where he left to pursue his passion for simplifying blockchain development with the founding of Commonware. He discusses the importance of application specific blockchains, the modularity of Commonware and how it is being designed to be "the best verticalized stack" for building blockchain applications.

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Ryne Saxe is CEO and Co-Founder of Eco, a network for apps that use stablecoins and stablecoin liquidity, providing a frictionless stablecoin experience that accelerates user onboarding and streamlines money movement onchain. Ryne is quite the polymath, sharing his journey as a physicist, coder, lawyer, turned technology founder. He shares his unique perspective on the evolution of payments technology over the last decade, its embrace of crypto, stablecoins as crypto's killer use case, and insights into building Eco to a platform that maximizes money’s value, especially as his second run as Eco’s CEO.

Siddarth "Sid" Sridhar is Founder and CEO of BIMA Labs, a decentralized finance platform that enables users to stake assets like Bitcoin and Bitcoin derivatives such as Liquid Staked Tokens (LST), to borrow USDB, a stablecoin pegged to the US Dollar. Sid talks about his journey from being a Draper-backed investor at 19 years old to being a crypto founder in the BitcoinFi space, the role of USDB plays in social impact by promoting financial inclusion, why over-collateralization is crucial for stability in the USDB model, how USDB differs from other traditional stablecoins - and insights on how BIMA's stablecoin, the USDB, fits into the broader financial ecosystem.