Onchain Summer 2024 with Jesse Pollak

Onchain Summer 2024 is here. We’re joined by Jesse Pollak to chat about all things Base - from their strategy to bring the world onchain to the Smart Wallet and resetting the price of a free mint. 25 minutes of onchain energy!

Ep 35 - Lucas Campbell

We're joined by Lucas of Pods to chat about the future of onchain media. We cover his journey building a career in web3 out of college and dive into new form factors for the next bull market.

MakerDAO Founder Rune Christensen on DeFi’s Biggest Test Yet

In the first episode ever, we speak with Rune Christensen, the founder of MakerDAO, the largest lending platform by assets in decentralized finance and the issuer of the Dai stablecoin. Rune has been in crypto since 2011 and is no stranger to volatility and crazy market conditions. Still, last month was the most shocking for him yet. On March 12th 2020, MakerDAO’s mechanism to heal loans that become under-collateralized broke down amid the market crash, allowing one trader to run off with more than $4 million in free ether. He calls it Maker’s toughest test yet, and he believes the protocol passed it. Key things we talked about: • MakerDAO’s plan to hand control to its community and dissolve the Maker Foundation • MKR auction and token whales • The decision to add centralized collateral to back Dai • Whether Maker will add Bitcoin as collateral and create a euro-pegged Dai • Collateral holders who lost 100% of their funds in the March 12 crash • Rune’s long-term vision for DeFi and Maker, as an enabler for financial inclusion

Chainlink’s Sergey Nazarov Says Devs Neglect Oracle Risks

This interview is with Sergey Nazarov, the cofounder of oracle provider Chainlink. The way blockchain applications get their data has proven to be crucial, as failures in those systems have been at the core of many of the latest attacks in decentralized finance. He says developers are currently underestimating the complexities of building data aggregators and oracle systems and says, the only reason these dangerous patterns are not as discussed is because the losses have not been Mt. Gox level. In this conversation Nazarov makes the case on why the Chainlink platform is meant to help avoid those risks. We also talk about the main trends he’s seeing in the space, Chainlink’s plans for the coming months, and his vision for a more decentralized future.

Yearn Founder Andre Cronje Says DeFi Comes With Responsibility

Andre Cronje is the developer of the yearn platform and YFI token. There’s this sort of mysticism around Andre. The solo genius builder who relentlessly releases code even if it hasn’t always been properly audited or tested. The DeFi wizard capable of turning a token which he himself claimed to be valueless to be worth thousands of dollars in a few days. He talks about the actual paralyzing fear that comes with building money protocol, the huge responsibility he feels, and how finger-pointing has caused him to quit the space before. But he says the drive to continue innovating has helped him overcome that fear and keep building.

Aave’s Stani Kulechov Talks About Building the Biggest DeFi Lender

Stani Kulechov the founder and CEO of Aave. When we spoke Aave was the second-largest DeFi protocol, but in the days after our conversation, it rose to overtake MakerDAO and become the DeFi platform with the most assets held in its smart contracts, at over $1B in digital assets. It’s been an exponential rise for Aave, which launched just eight months ago and in that short time was able to climb the famous Defi Pulse Total Value Locked ranking to the top. It’s done so pushing DeFi forward by driving innovation in interest-generating tokens, flash loans and delegated credit lines, which are all lowering the barriers of entry to users from all corners of the world to access financial applications. We also get into all the recent yield farming craziness, which he wishes was more restrained.

Synthetix’s Kain Warwick Talks About What it Takes to Scale

This week, we sat with Kain Warwick, DeFi OG and founder of Synthetix. In some ways, last year wasn’t a great one for the synthetic assets protocol. As many DeFi projects boomed, SNX’s price and TVL dropped. Kain says he was too optimistic about how soon Synthetix would be able to scale with optimistic roll-ups. If he were to do things again, he would probably use Polygon first and move to Optimism once the solution was ready. But last year was also a time to build on a strong foundation. He’s looking forward to the months to come, when all of that effort hopefully comes to light, with the protocol fully live on Optimism, with perpetual swaps expected to be launched too. He’s a firm believer that Ethereum and its Layer 2 solutions will capture the most value being built in DeFi and web3.