Podcast

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.

Aki Balogh is Founder and CEO of iBTC, a project that harnesses the power of Discrete Log Contracts (DLCs) to establish the safest, theft-proof, and institutionally compliant trustless bridge between Bitcoin, Etherum and other chains. Aki shares his journey into entrepreneurship and crypto, discusses his vision of how DLC can unlock BTCFi, the mechanics of iBTC fka dlcLink, and his thoughts on the exploding Bitcoin L2 ecosystem.

Elias Tazartes is Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Kakarot, a zero-knowledge EVM written in Cairo aiming to allow users to leverage the scaling benefits of validity roll-ups while maintaining compatibility with the Ethereum ecosystem. Elias shares on the emergence of verifiable computing and how Kakarot is innovating applied Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) to transform the blockchain industry securing billions of transactions. Elias dives deep into Kakarot’s evolution as it crosses its two-year anniversary, discussing the challenges ahead, the ambitious goals for 2025 and beyond, and how Kakarot is delivering Ethereum-compatible block proving in real-time. He also sheds light on the larger vision of ZK's role in evolving Ethereum and the broader digital ecosystem.