#178 - MIKE DEMARAIS
Mike is a co-founder of Rainbow, one of the most widely used wallets in crypto (wowowow). Before Rainbow, Mike started a couple of companies and worked for a few others after dropping out of college following his first semester. Follow Mike on X @mikedemarais and on Warpcast @mikedemarais.eth. 0:00 - Mike's story from college dropout to crypto founder 10:31 - Starting companies to fix computers & 3D print toys 17:24 - Why Mike likes small towns and lower tier cities 23:53 - The irresistible opportunity to build in crypto 27:00 - Mike's product and design forward approach 30:33 - Inflection points in Rainbow’s growth to date 38:25 - Breaking down Rainbow’s ETH rewards program 46:25 - The future of Farcaster compared to Twitter For more episodes, go to podofjake.com. Previous guests include Mark Cuban, Vitalik Buterin, Brian Armstrong, Balaji Srinivasan, Keith Rabois, Ali Spagnola, Anthony Pompliano, Raoul Pal, Julia Galef, Jack Butcher, Tim Draper, and over 100 others alike. Learn from founders and CEOs of companies like OpenAI, Coinbase, Solana, Polygon, AngelList, Oura, and Replit, and investors from Founders Fund, a16z, Union Square Ventures, and many more. I appreciate your support and hope you enjoy. Thanks to Chase Devens for the show notes and Yiction for the music. Lastly, I love hearing from fans of the pod. Feel free to email me any time at jake@blogofjake.com. Thank you!
Rainbow Rewards with Mike Demarais
Rainbow wallet just debuted their first ETH rewards to top users of the hottest growing crypto mobile wallet. We sat down with the founder to chat through Rainbow’s journey launching a points system and building a compelling mobile-first experience for crypto-natives and beginners alike. We dive into onchain social discovery, celebrity coins and much more!
Erik Voorhees' New Venture: Why AI Desperately Needs Privacy and Uncensorability
Erik Voorhees, a crypto OG, has launched Venice, a private, uncensorable, open-source competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, powered by a decentralized crypto network. In the episode, Erik and Venice’s COO Teana Baker-Taylor delve into the problems with censorship and data in current AI agents, including how they create honeypots of information about users’ search history for hackers, or that they can be absurdly politically correct, such as refusing to create images of Caucasian people. As they point out, there’s also the risk that the companies managing them could be censoring the models to please the Chinese government, in order to access the market in that country. They talk about their plan for Venice to gain market share, considering that DuckDuckGo, a privacy-preserving competitor to Google, has a much smaller market share. And they explain why they intend for Venice to eventually use the compute of Morpheus, or other decentralized crypto-powered compute networks. They also critique the SEC’s current regulatory approach to crypto, calling it “a joke.” Additionally, they explore the concept of AI agents using cryptocurrencies as their primary currency.
