From the archive: This interview was originally published on November 2, 2020, during the first DeFi boom and only months after YFI launched. Projects, market conditions, governance structures, and Cronje’s role in Yearn reflect the time of the conversation.

By November 2020, Yearn Finance had become one of the defining experiments of DeFi’s first major cycle. What began as a tool Andre Cronje built to move his own funds between lending protocols had grown into an ecosystem governed through YFI, a token launched without a conventional founder allocation.

The story quickly acquired its own mythology: the relentless builder, the “fair launch,” governance by token holders, and the idea of handing control of a protocol to its community. Cronje’s account was considerably less romantic.

I spoke with him about why he built Yearn, the limits of token governance, the mismatch between users and speculators, DeFi’s dependence on overcollateralization, machine learning and credit, and why giving Yearn away had little to do with fairness.

Tell us about your background.

Did my LLB, took a year off, friend needed transport to CompSci lectures, so I gave him a lift to classes and joined some of his classes, figured I’m doing the classes, might as well write the exams, finish CompSci, ended up becoming a lecturer, from there moved to Vodacom, building telecom systems (GGSN, ISN), built mesh networks in Africa, went into big data, neural nets, moved onto fintech, and from there just naturally progressed into blockchain, originally as a researcher, and then finally as an engineer.

What first attracted you to the decentralized ledger technologies?

2016, 2017 blockchain research was making a lot of big promises, solving problems we’ve had in mesh networks, big data, and ML for years, so it seemed very enticing. After getting involved in the space, I realized that it was mostly marketing hype and lies, but at the core, decentralized technology is still powerful, so has been sticking around ever since.

Could you tell a little bit about Yearn Finance. What led you to develop it? What kind of problems are you trying to solve?

Late 2019 I had a simple problem, I had some funds and I wanted to maximize the yield it was receiving. So I would move it around between Aave, dYdX, Compound, and Fulcrum. This quickly became tedious, so I wrote some solidity to move it for me.

Could you describe the processes and mechanisms involved in Yearn v1 and Yearn v2?

Pretty straight forward, compare yields at different providers, switch funds.

In your opinion, what are the main challenges of decentralized governance?

Participation apathy. The problem with governance tokens, they have secondary trading markets, so you end up with a large portion of “speculators” holding the tokens, with no interest to participate in governance. This participation apathy makes governance rather pointless, so you have to decrease quorum and proposal thresholds, essentially “cutting out” the speculators, but in doing so, also decreasing the security of the network. The misalignment of incentives between speculators and users is the biggest problem.

Could you tell our readers a bit about the Yearn governance processes?

Yearn governance is a very fluid and open ended system, anyone can make snapshot (off-chain proposals), or create governance discussions (gov.yearn.finance), but ultimately everything comes down to “is someone willing to implement it”, so often the contributors are driving governance, since they are the ones building the solutions. More resembling corporate governance than decentralized governance.

Do you think “fair launch” is fairer than a founder getting at least something to pay off his debts accumulated while building the project?

Nothing “fair” about it, if speculators made money, they will say its fair, if they didn’t, they will say it wasn’t. That simple. Founders should be rewarded for their work and commitment, more so than random users that purchase tokens off of a secondary market.

What are your thoughts on the current state of the DeFi space? Which projects are particularly exciting?

Somewhat pessimistic. Most projects are trying to replicate traditional finance, and I simply don’t think that’s the right way to do it, traditional finance works because of fractional reserves, we can’t do fractional reserves on defi, so we will always be capital inefficient. Traditional finance solutions will mostly fail in DeFi.

As a machine learning researcher, how do you think neural networks can be used for DeFi protocols?

I used to work for a credit bureau, thanks to neural networks we managed to optimize the risk profiles, I believe the same should be applied to blockchain to allow under collateralization.

How do you envision Yearn Finance will evolve over the next years? What are you excited to build next?

That’s up to yearn, I am no longer a driving force behind it, you can’t exit to the community unless you are willing to exit.

What’s behind the toxicity in the crypto community that almost drove you out this summer?

Lack of personal responsibility and the delusion that token price dictates value.

There’s this sort of mysticism around you as the genius builder who relentlessly releases code. Besides building, what is your favorite thing to do?

I used to be heavy into MMA and bodybuilding, although nowadays I just code.

Originally published November 2, 2020.

Part of the Paradigm Interviews archive.

From the archive: This interview was originally published on August 10, 2020, days after the Medalla multi-client testnet went live. Terminology, timelines, network architecture, and expectations reflect Ethereum’s roadmap at the time.

In August 2020, Ethereum 2.0 was still a roadmap divided into phases. The Beacon Chain had yet to launch, proof of stake was being tested at scale, and the recently launched Medalla testnet brought thousands of validators and multiple independent clients onto the same network.

Behind the transition was an unusual engineering constraint: Ethereum wanted substantially greater scale while preserving the ability of ordinary participants to verify and participate in the network. That decision made almost every part of the system harder, from consensus and networking to specifications, testing, and client coordination.

I spoke with Ethereum Foundation researcher Danny Ryan shortly after Medalla went live about the architecture of Eth2, proof of stake, sharding, client diversity, the limits of Layer 1 competition, and why decentralization was worth the additional complexity.

Tell us about your background. How did you first get involved with crypto and Ethereum?

I heard about bitcoin in college and wasted a little bit of time day trading bitcoin and losing money. Although I understood bitcoin, it didn’t quite click and capture my interest. As for Ethereum, I learned about it from a friend before launch. It seemed interesting, but I still didn’t give it much more than a cursory look. Another friend texted me when The DAO made national news as it raised 10s of millions of dollars. I dug a little deeper and became quite captivated by the possibilities. I haven’t been able to pull myself out of the rabbit hole since. I started small, contributing code to random repos, but soon I got rid of all my clients (was a freelance dev) and decided to figure out how to make this my work. From there, I started a local New Orleans Ethereum meetup and did a deep-dive on proof of stake research. Eventually after a number of contributions, the EF hired me on to continue my work on a more formal basis.

Ethereum has all these phases coming. In brief, what should we actually expect from Ethereum 2.0 during the phases of the upgrade? And when do you expect Eth2 to go live?

If you haven’t had a chance to read my recent blog post, The State of Eth2, I highly recommend it. I try to give context on the project, discuss the trade-offs, the timelines, and the benefits over time. Specifically, check out the “Benefits of eth2 to the community over time” section. In short, Phase 0 bootstraps the system, Phase 1 provides a highly scalable data-layer that, through the use of eth2 light clients in Ethereum, can be leveraged by layer 2 constructions for scalability, Phase 1.5 is the unification of the Ethereum chain that we know and love as a shard under the upgraded eth2 consensus, and Phase 2+ is expanding the functionality of shards over time.

So there are a lot of the benefits of Eth2 to the community.

Better security properties through PoS, more layer 1 scale through sharding, and the elimination of energy intensive PoW which is also naturally centralizing due to asymmetric access to physical hardware.

The multi-client paradigm has many significant advantages (and also difficulties). Which ones?

Again, check out my recent post, specifically the “So many clients” section for my views on this. In short, it provides a wider exploration of the design and end-user space, as well as providing redundancies in the event of failures and attacks. The complexities come in additional coordination overhead, but we have many stellar client teams so that hasn’t been too much of a drag.

Could you please share with us the current running state of Eth2 clients and testnets?

We just launched the Medalla testnet. This testnet is composed of 20k+ validators on over 600 nodes distributed across the world and is greater than 80% run by the community. Client teams continue to harden their systems and work on UX and documentation, but the stabilities we are seeing on this production-grade testnet are signalling for a clear path to mainnet.

What are your thoughts on Proof of Stake leading to a wider and wider wealth gap over time?

PoS has a more pure mechanism to seek a return on capital no matter the size of the participating asset, whereas PoW has distinct economies of scale that allow those with wealth to compound it at a higher rate. Crypto-economic protocols do not seek to remove the notion of being able to make a return on capital, but proof of stake can make access to that return more equitable and widely distributed.

Casper Sharding is a combined effort between the migration to Proof of Stake and Sharding for Ethereum. Tell us about this approach, its difficulties, and why it’s worth it.

Both of these mechanisms are designed to enhance the system while retaining strong properties of decentralization. You can easily scale up a block chain through simpler mechanisms than sharding, but these mechanisms tend to reduce the ability for users to follow and participate in consensus with consumer hardware. Proof of Stake and Sharding, though, allow for a wide set of participants to contribute to the construction of a highly scalable protocol even with standard consumer hardware. There are plenty of difficulties in this path. Both PoS and sharding require sophisticated in-protocol mechanisms. It is tough to design and build these systems. In addition to that, the p2p network has to be “sharded” in a sense. If all nodes have to relay all gossip’d data about all shards, then we lose scale with respect to bandwidth. Fortunately, libp2p has a mechanism called “gossipsub” that we’ve been able to leverage to meet most our needs for this problem. Still, managing such a network is much more complex than a single chain paradigm.

In your point of view, what are the biggest challenges involved in bringing Ethereum 2.0 to life?

For a long time, turning abstract research into complex specs was a big challenge. At this point, it’s primarily engineering. As discussed above, the mechanisms here are complex, and due to the high value of the Ethereum network, we have to get them right out the gate.

As we know, the fundamental design decision that makes what you’re building so hard is that, in Ethereum, you choose to gain scalability without compromising on decentralization or availability. Tell us a bit more about that.

As discussed in the past few answers, both PoS and sharding require a sizable amount of consensus complexity but do achieve our goal of scale without sacrificing decentralization.

DeFi “yield farming” is one of the hottest topics in the crypto world so far. What is your opinion on this field? Do you believe in them?

I don’t have time to follow the application space too closely. I’m aware of what’s going on, but don’t have too much opinion here. I’m excited to see experimentation and innovation, but won’t make a claim on sustainability of this particular mechanism or anything.

Do you view other developing blockchain technologies like Polkadot or Cosmos as competitors to Eth2? Or as collaborators?

It’s a bit of a mix. I think that the blockchain ecosystem is going to continue to grow massively in the next 10 years, but I also am unsure of how many layer 1’s the market (and thus the security of these systems) can support. As seen with the repeated attacks of ETC recently, low value chains aren’t going to be able to thrive in the long run so I do expect some natural coalescence around only a small number of high value chains.

Besides Ethereum, what projects do you consider promising today?

My garden. I just harvested some tomatoes and peppers a couple of days ago and have some more veggies queued up.

How will the world be different once Ethereum 2.0 and crypto win?

More open access and transparency in the digital systems we interact with. This will lead to better designs, less chance for predatory practices, and more power for the user. Ideally we can disrupt the status quo and the current trajectory of the siloed, centralized internet in which we are constantly subject to manipulation and are in fact the product. I am deeply concerned about technology and society, and hopefully decentralized technologies become a tool for us to find a better equilibrium.

What Ethereum 2.0 means to you personally?

Fun, stress, community, years of my life.

What is your favorite crypto meme for now?

I’m so out of the loop…

Originally published August 10, 2020.

Part of the Paradigm Interviews archive.

From the archive: This interview was originally published on July 20, 2020, while Ethereum 2.0 was still approaching its first major launch milestone. Terminology, timelines, network names, and expectations reflect the time of the conversation.

In July 2020, Ethereum’s transition toward proof of stake was still being tested in public.

Multiple ETH2 clients were implementing the same specification, the Altona testnet was running with several client teams, and Medalla was being prepared as the next major multi-client test before mainnet. Much of the work depended on different implementations agreeing on the same protocol under real network conditions.

Afri Schoedon had been one of the key figures pushing that process forward. After years of work around Ethereum infrastructure and hard-fork coordination, he became closely associated with the multi-client testnets that preceded ETH2’s launch.

I spoke with him about how staking would work, why client diversity mattered, the state of sharding research, Ethereum governance, his departure from active protocol coordination, and why sometimes reaching no decision at all can be a legitimate form of consensus.

The long-anticipated ETH2 milestone is getting closer every day. Could you please explain to our readers what ETH2 looks like in plain words? And when do you expect ETH2.0 to go live?

If you have some ETH1 coins in your pocket, you could take them out, melt them, and pour them into a specially prepared wallet inside an unbreakable titan-wall. You will not be able to retrieve these coins again. For every 32 coins, you irreversibly melt into that wall, you would get one badge that states “VALIDATOR” legitimizing you to secure the ETH2 society patrolling the streets and being on the lookout for criminals. Doing so earns you rewards on your badge that eventually in the future can be cashed out and used to buy groceries or other items. The Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain will launch in November unless we find severe bugs in clients or protocol. I’m in-between Vitalk and Justin with my estimation here, I don’t think that we necessarily need to delay Ethereum 2.0 into 2021 unless we find critical issues. We are well on track for a late 2020 launch.

The multi-client testnet is considered to be the ultimate hurdle before we see real ETH2. As the initiator of ETH2 multi-client testnets, could you please share with us the primary targets of multi-clients, and its current running state?

Currently, at least five clients implement the latest version of the Ethereum 2.0 specification. The currently running Altona testnet appears to be stable which featured four clients in Genesis and just added a fifth with Lodestar. This allows us to prepare launching the official multi-client testnet Medalla very soon, which would mark the final step towards an Ethereum 2.0 mainnet launch.

ETH2 is opening a lot of opportunities, for example, for investors and miners. How could various stakeholders participate in ETH2 staking?

They can lock their ETH1 tokens and secure the beacon chain. There is probably not much more available very soon, I fear.

DeFi “yield farming” is one of the hottest topics in the crypto world so far. What is your opinion on this hype? Do you believe in them?

I’m a layer-1 person, I don’t really follow “DeFi.”

Do you think we can elevate the security of sharding computations to an adequate level?

Yes, but I’m not an expert on that. I enjoyed reading the Nightshade whitepaper. It’s both interesting for people to learn more about sharding but also offers a practical approach to validator partitioning and state sharding.

Do you think any of the existing networks deliver a proper level of development framework?

Besides Bitcoin and Ethereum, I’m quite attracted by what the NEAR community is offering for developers. That means I’m tempted to try it out, I haven’t touched their stack, yet.

Do you think we will ever be able to overcome onchain limitations to cope with offchain governance?

I don’t fully get that question. I think that off-chain governance is a feature and the inability to change seemingly controversial or non-technical parameters in most cases is an advantage. I’m having a lot of understanding about the conservative approach that Bitcoin does: soft-fork or no upgrade at all; but I also appreciate the pragmatic way of doing regular protocol upgrades on Ethereum. Yet I believe, not coming to a conclusion or not finding a rough consensus on some issues is actually a feature and protective measure.

A question that excites many community members: in nutshell, why did you leave Ethereum in 2019?

I was volunteering in a key-role of hard-fork coordination for Ethereum that many people mistakenly believed was a role of power. Due to an unfortunate statement on Twitter, I had to give up my contributions as it would have been impossible to work in that area without the support of the community. I never left Ethereum though, I just ceased active contributions and retired my online-identity after threats of physical violence against my family.

We are all going through these hard pandemic times. Could you tell us about your COVID19 experience?

I’m privileged to pay taxes in Germany where we have not cut down on health care, yet. So far, the COVID-19 experience here is not too bad. There are days I forget about the pandemic because there are only so few active cases here. I can really recommend that to other nations, by the way, cut down spending money for bullshit such as the military and invest in education and health care instead. It will pay off one day, eventually. Also don’t elect freaks as president, I know it’s tempting, just try to be reasonable.

And a question for dessert. What is your favorite crypto meme for now?

My fav meme is that guy in a club explaining crypto to a girl in detail. She’s obviously not really impressed and someone commented that meme on Twitter saying, “this, but both are guys.”

Originally published July 20, 2020.

Part of the Paradigm Interviews archive.

From the archive: This interview was originally published on October 19, 2020, shortly after the Avalanche mainnet went live. Titles, figures, product plans, and ecosystem references reflect the time of the conversation.

Avalanche had launched its mainnet only a month earlier when we spoke with Emin Gün Sirer in October 2020. The network arrived with an ambitious claim: a new family of consensus protocols could deliver fast finality and high throughput while allowing a large number of validators to participate.

For Sirer, the project also continued a much longer line of research. He had been working on peer-to-peer systems and digital currencies since the early 2000s, years before Bitcoin, and later became known for research into vulnerabilities such as selfish mining.

We talked about the ideas behind Avalanche, its approach to consensus, the role of subnets, compatibility with Ethereum, the then-planned Athereum network, DeFi, developer incentives, and what Ava Labs hoped blockchain infrastructure might look like by 2030.

Six years later, the interview reads as a snapshot of a period when Layer 1 design was still one of crypto’s central open questions, and competing architectures were making very different bets about scalability, interoperability, decentralization.

What first brought you into cryptocurrencies and peer-to-peer systems?

I started looking into cryptocurrencies and peer-to-peer systems, especially for file-sharing, in 2001.

In file-sharing, there was a problem where people who downloaded files would not upload — people who were called “leeches” as they would take but wouldn’t give. This happens to be a common problem for most P2P systems.

My idea back then was to have a decentralized currency where you have to pay for downloading, and are rewarded for uploading things with a digital currency. In that way, people would ultimately run out of coins and have to contribute by uploading new material. This idea gave birth to a system called Karma that used Drs. Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor’s proof-of-work invention.

I published Karma in 2003, about 6 years before Satoshi and Bitcoin. Unfortunately, I was in the US and Karma was in its earliest stages just after 9/11. I was a young professor, and my colleagues told me that what I was creating was really interesting, but that I would never get funding for this kind of work as there’s so much concern about terrorist financing.

They were right, and I don’t think I could have built a career on decentralized currencies back then, so I stopped working on Karma and moved on to new areas of study.

I came back to cryptocurrencies when Bitcoin came along. While I recognized the breakthrough Satoshi had created, I discovered the biggest flaw in the Bitcoin protocol, a problem called “selfish mining” where miners could collude to increase their revenue and centralize operations.

People initially denied its existence, and crowdfunded a whole bunch of studies to try and prove us wrong, but eventually concluded our conclusions were exactly right and became our best partners.

Last month, the long-awaited Avalanche Mainnet finally went live. Congratulations with the launch! Could you please explain the inner workings of Avalanche to our readers? What kind of problems your team is trying to solve? Why is it important?

Avalanche is built on the first major breakthrough in decentralized consensus since an anonymous person named Satoshi Nakamoto released the bitcoin whitepaper in 2008.

In the 12 years since, there have been many efforts to create networks that enable decentralized applications to flourish, but these projects have either copied bitcoin’s model or tried to implement decades-old designs for distributed systems that compromise decentralization.

Avalanche avoids these pitfalls by embracing a new family of consensus protocols to empower performance only dreamed of in the last forty years of research in this space.

It is the first smart contracts platform that confirms transactions in under one second, supports the entirety of the Ethereum development toolkit, and enables millions of independent validators to participate as full block producers.

In addition to supporting transaction finality under 1 second, Avalanche is capable of throughput orders of magnitude greater than existing blockchain networks, reaching 4500+ transactions per second, and security thresholds well-above the 51% standards of other networks.

Avalanche featured over 1,000 nodes operated by community members on its Denali testnet. How does the platform enable up to millions of independent validators to participate as full, block-producing nodes? How is it capable of throughput orders of magnitude greater than existing blockchain networks (4,500+ transactions/second), and security thresholds well-above the 51% standards of other networks?

Over time, people have come to a false understanding that blockchains have to be slow and not scalable after seeing the existing blockchains in action. The Avalanche protocol employs a novel approach to consensus to achieve its strong safety guarantees, while achieving quick finality and high-throughput, without compromising decentralization.

Classical consensus protocols, like those employed by many projects who call themselves “Ethereum Killers,” have shown that a network can come to consensus despite adversary participants, but they can’t scale participation without performance issues beyond about 100 nodes.

Nakamoto consensus, which underpins Bitcoin, continues to demonstrate to the world that probabilistic protocols are safe in practice as long as the chance of a safety failure is so astronomically remote that if one occurs it would be more fascinating than the network having a little hiccup for a bit. While this can provide unprecedented decentralization and robustness, the trade-off is in the network’s extensive time to finality and low-throughput.

Avalanche takes these revelations and combines them into a new protocol that attacks scaling, security, and speed at the absolute foundation of decentralized networks.

At a high-level, when a transaction is broadcast to the network, Avalanche validators undergo a process known as “repeated random subsampling” to independently poll other validators to determine if the transaction is valid. Validators do this over and over again on new randomly selected nodes until it builds up enough data to determine that its probability of being correct is so high you may as well consider it impossible that it’s wrong. With enough confidence, a decision is finalized immediately.

This process happens so quickly that Avalanche rivals major payment systems in its ability process and clear transactions in a network.

Could you share AVA Labs’ goals and roadmap for 2020? What features will be available after the Mainnet launch? What will be next?

We’re going to continue working on the platform to optimize performance and implement features that improve its data handling and storage. We’re also investing the time and resources to help our community and partners on-board into the Avalanche ecosystem.

I can’t share specifics about some of our biggest launches to-come, but we have big plans for the rest of this year, and many years ahead.

Ava Labs were established in 2018. What has been the major problem that your research team solved while designing the protocol during all these years?

This trilemma says you can’t have security, decentralization, and speed in a single blockchain network.

In fairness to the researchers and developers in our ecosystem who remain skeptical about a network claiming to solve all three, a solution to these three areas wasn’t possible with existing networks at their disposal.

To be clear, these aren’t easy improvements to make, but it’s hard to overstate the impact.

With Avalanche, we’ve innovated at every level of blockchain networks. Foundationally, with a breakthrough in consensus protocols, and then continuing, layer-by-layer, to evolve areas like network and virtual machine models that other projects had skipped over.

A question for hungry developers: tell us a little bit about Avalanche X grant program that is meant to bootstrap the ecosystem. What kind of development is expected: core protocol, SDKs, applications or enterprise adoption?

Avalanche-X is our moonshot accelerator for developers building decentralized applications and core infrastructures like an end-to-end testing suite to accelerate further app development.

We award grants across a wide-range of competencies, and continue to both post requests for grant proposals as well as accept open grant submissions for projects not currently on our radar.

Currently, we’re looking for grants for projects like a decentralized exchange, lending, derivatives, and stablecoins, but we encourage anyone with the technical abilities and vision to build decentralized technologies to pitch their ideas.

DeFi has shown that the power of blockchain is not smart-contracts running in a closed environment but the interconnectivity of smart-contract protocols. How will applications based on Avalanche become compatible with Ethereum?

The answer is two-fold.

First, Avalanche’s contract chain, “C-Chain,” is a highly scalable implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine. It is compatible with all of the Ethereum tooling that has fueled DeFi’s growth to-date, including MetaMask, Web3.js, Remix, Truffle Suite, and Embark Platform.

For existing DeFi projects, that means they can seamlessly port their contracts from Ethereum to Avalanche and see how their applications run on a network with sub-second finality and high-throughput.

Second, Avalanche will support bridges to other networks for users to move assets between the networks. We’ll be launching a bridge to Ethereum very soon that will enable activity between the networks, like transferring assets like stablecoins between the networks or “wrapping” native assets on Avalanche, without losing any functionality.

Beyond Ethereum’s DeFi ecosystem, Avalanche can support any virtual machine on a custom subnet (short for “sub-network”). That means developers can launch another network’s logic or smart contract tools on Avalanche — with their own rules and set of validators — with the only change coming to the underlying consensus mechanism.

That could lead to a new generation of farming in our space, where blockchains launched on Avalanche can be harvested for yield, rather than individual ERC-20 tokens. For instance, Ethereum Classic could be ported to Avalanche as a subnet to solve its hashpower shortage, while also benefiting from the fast finality and higher throughput.

Could you tell us a little bit about a subnetwork called Athereum?

Athereum is a “spoon”, or friendly fork, of Ethereum. We have not finalized all of the plans yet, but it will be a version of the Ethereum network, with a snapshot of its state, launched as a subnet on Avalanche.

Instead of requiring the longest chain proof-of-work that currently underpins Ethereum, Athereum uses a staking-based linear chain version of the Avalanche consensus protocol, much like how Ethereum 2.0 intends to migrate Ethereum from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.

Unlike the Ethereum 1.0 to 2.0 migration, however, Athereum doesn’t force users to burn their tokens to join the new network, and thereby lock them into a network that hasn’t yet proven its mettle.

Looking ahead to 2030. How do you envision that AVA Labs will evolve over the next ten years?

Avalanche aims to follow in Satoshi’s footsteps to have the same, defining impact as we stand on the cusp of a new decade. It will create a market structure driven by velocity, efficient use of capital, and innovation in new products & services that aren’t possible today.

I hope by 2030, we’ve achieved that mission and showed the world what blockchains are truly capable of, because they’re still just barely scratching the surface.

What are your current research interests?

I’m currently very excited about innovative applications on top of Avalanche. We want to bring the innovation we brought to Layer 1 to the application layer. We’re especially excited about decentralized exchanges (DEXes), automated market makers, DeFi and lending in general, as well as innovative new assets that create new digital products that can be traded globally.

Outside of crypto and blockchain, what is your favorite thing to do?

I like to sail small boats, especially small, cheap, two-person boats that go fast while the crew is hanging from a rope. I also like making things out of wood, even when they turn out to be slightly out of square.

Originally published October 19, 2020.

Part of the Paradigm Interviews archive.

From the archive: This interview was originally published on October 22, 2020, as Cosmos was preparing for Stargate and the launch of inter-blockchain communication. Titles, projects, roadmaps, and ecosystem data reflect the time of the conversation.

In October 2020, Cosmos was approaching one of the most consequential releases in its early history. Stargate, the upgrade that would enable IBC, was nearing launch, opening the possibility of permissionless communication between sovereign blockchains.

At Tendermint, the team was also working on Starport, an attempt to make launching a Cosmos-based blockchain dramatically easier. Behind both projects was a broader thesis: applications could have their own chains, communities could control their own infrastructure, and interoperability could connect them without collapsing everything onto a single network.

I spoke with Peng Zhong, then CEO and President of Tendermint, about how he entered crypto, the philosophy behind Cosmos, developer experience, enterprise adoption, regulation, validator infrastructure, and what decentralization meant in practice.

Read six years later, the conversation captures the Cosmos thesis before the multi-chain model became one of crypto’s defining architectural debates.

What brought you to the blockchain space? When did you first hear about crypto and Tendermint in particular? How did you become part of the project?

I read about Bitcoin on Hacker News when it reached $1. I think this was 2011. I brushed it off as a novelty. In 2012, when BTC reached ~$130, I started accepting it for my web design business.

In 2013, I was contracted by Jae Kwon to build the frontend for FtNox, a crypto exchange named after “Fort Knox” and “Mt.Gox”. In mid 2014, the infamous Mt.Gox exchange revealed it had lost 850,000 BTC and had been fraudulently operating as a fractional reserve. This revelation kicked off a brutal crypto winter, and the price of BTC wouldn’t recover for 2.5 years.

During this bearish period, Jae Kwon emailed me and asked if I wanted to help build the next great thing in blockchain. I believed in the long term future of crypto and accepted this job offer. I became the first employee of Tendermint in late 2015.

Could you tell a little bit about Tendermint, and what kind of problems the team is trying to solve?

Tendermint has a vision for a more open and accountable decentralized economy that is governed by its participants.

What is the company’s mission, long-term priorities and strategy?

We encourage people to build their own decentralized organizations, governance platforms, social networks with the open source Cosmos tools that we provide. For the best projects, we provide mentoring, marketing support, and capital investment to help them get their new projects off the ground.

Could you share Tendermint’s goals and roadmap for 2020? What will be next? How do you envision Tendermint will evolve over the next few years?

For this remainder of this year, our goal is to support the community and help get the Cosmos SDK to Stargate, also known as v0.40. At the time of this interview the first release candidate for Stargate has arrived. With this update, the interblockchain communication (IBC) protocol is enabled for the first time, and allows the permissionless exchange of tokens across sovereign blockchains.

We’re extremely excited about this mult-chain future, and internally we’ve been working on Starport to bring this incredible future a little closer to present day.

A while ago, your team launched Starport, the open-source rapid prototyping tool that lets developers quickly build blockchain apps in two commands. Could you please explain to our readers what Starport is and why it’s important?

Starport is the easiest way in the world for people to build a blockchain. Unlike Ethereum, Polkadot, or Avalanche, you don’t have to buy our token to be a part of the Cosmos ecosystem. You and your community of token holders have sovereignty — absolute ownership — over your foundations.

Even more than just a sovereign chain, Starport lets you send and receive tokens from your chain to any other chain is built with Starport, the Cosmos SDK, or any other blockchain platform that supports IBC.

What are your thoughts on the current state of the blockchain space? Aside from Tendermint, which projects are particularly exciting?

The DeFi space in Ethereum is definitely the the most exciting today. I keep a close eye on projects that have strong product-market fit like Uniswap, Maker, and Yearn. Yearn is particularly impressive project in terms of how quickly they launched their community.

What is your favourite project from the Cosmos/Tendermint ecosystem? What projects do you consider promising today?

I’m biased, but my favorite project would have to be one of our own: Starport. As developers become more and more invested into our ecosystem, they tend to forget how much effort it took for them to understand it in the first place. Working on a product focused on developer experience makes sure we prioritize the first-time experience for new people learning about Cosmos. I don’t think there’s anything more important.

The big question for every blockchain platform is connection with enterprise. As you see it, what could this enterprise blockchain ecosystem look like?

As an enterprise, investing into blockchain technology shouldn’t have to massive amounts of time or capital. With the current version of Starport, you’re able to build a new blockchain in minutes. My goal is to make the Cosmos platform easy to enough to use so that any enterprise team can spin up a new chain to solve their business problem, like they do with Google Sheets or Airtable today.

In your experience, are there any challenges of balancing pragmatism and regulation with the decentralised ideology?

Regulation is always going to be trailing technological innovation. By being a part of the blockchain ecosystem you are already participating in a legal gray area. I think all of us in this space have the shared vision that decentralized ledgers are a net positive for humanity. Disregarding anything particularly egregious, I’m hoping that regulators will work with us on a good faith basis.

Many validators use cloud-based services such as AWS to deploy nodes, meaning that they are reliant on a centralized entity. In your opinion, does it affect decentralization in any way? And if it does, are you going to deal with it somehow?

Decentralization is a spectrum. Most of a blockchain application being validated on a combination of Google Cloud, AWS, and self-hosted setups is a massive improvement over traditional centralized applications. I think over time we will see that chains consisting of mostly self-hosted validators result in a more resilient application than ones that are primarily cloud hosted. We can also create metrics that incentivize self-hosting.

What does work in Tendermint mean to you personally?

Bitcoin has been around for 11 years, but crypto continues to be a cutting-edge and fast moving industry. I enjoy working in a new field of technology and taking part in creating the initial green field standards and platforms. I joined Tendermint five years ago to focus on bringing the benefits of blockchain to the masses. We’re still far from that, and I’m excited to move this further.

One last question for posterity. What is your favorite crypto meme?

I like “few understand” from $YFI’s Blue Kirby. Sadly the Blue Kirby account has been deleted by its creator, but this Twitter account had a massive impact in Ethereum DeFi for the brief period it was around. We’re all early adopters and this meme sums up the entire crypto ecosystem.

Let’s keep building!

Originally published October 22, 2020.

Part of the Paradigm Interviews archive.

From the archive: This interview was originally published on June 24, 2021, shortly after Matic Network became Polygon. It captures Polygon at an early stage of its expansion from a single scaling network into a broader Ethereum infrastructure project. Titles, figures, product plans, and ecosystem data reflect the time of the original conversation.

In early 2021, Matic Network became Polygon and widened its ambitions beyond the PoS chain that had first brought it attention. The project was beginning to describe itself as an aggregation layer for Ethereum scaling, with plans spanning ZK rollups, optimistic rollups, standalone chains, and developer infrastructure.

I spoke with co-founder Jaynti Kanani in June 2021 about how Polygon arrived at that thesis, why he believed Ethereum would continue to need external scaling, and what governance, security, and decentralization might eventually look like as the network grew.

Five years later, the conversation captures a formative moment in Ethereum’s scaling history, when the architecture of the post-DeFi ecosystem was still unusually open.

What first brought you into blockchain and crypto?

I was in the blockchain space and particularly in scaling to solve my problem. I was doing a side project — Game of Theories — where you can bet on TV series/Movie universe theories using real money and win if you are right. The idea came from “Game of Thrones”. People were discussing “what happened next” or “what will happen to this character” after each episode. And I wanted to make it more interesting. To integrate the payment system into that project, I started looking into Bitcoin/Ethereum. And then, I started going all-in crypto!

Could you tell a little bit about Polygon. What led you to develop it, and what kind of problems are you trying to solve?

At that time, people were trying to use CryptoKitties, and I thought that everytime people try to deploy anything on Ethereum, you will need scalability or else the developer experience will be degraded.

And that’s when I started Matic (now Polygon)! It was late 2017.

Currently, it provides a PoS commit-chain with 100 validators running the network all around the globe. In simple terms, it helps developers to scale their DApps. On Ethereum, if your transaction takes 5 mins/$100 to confirm, with Polygon chain, it will take 2–10 seconds/$0.0001 to confirm!

In future, Polygon will provide more offerings like Optimistic Rollup, ZK Rollup, stand-alone chains using Polygon sDK or any other kind of infrastructure tools required by the developer.

What differs Polygon from other L2 solutions?

What sets Polygon apart from other L2 solutions is our Layer 2 aggregation approach, which allows developers to pick the scaling solution best suited for their needs, be it ZK, OPR, Data availability chain or other scaling approaches like our PoS commit-chain.

We just released our Polygon SDK. Its offering aims to introduce structure to the ecosystem and provide a framework for Multi-chain Ethereum to grow further and faster.

Multi-chain Ethereum will be akin to other popular multi-chains, but with some major upsides:

• Ability to benefit from Ethereum’s network effects;

• More flexible and powerful;

• Seamless integration with other Polygon ecosystem products.

Why did you decide to expand the scope of Matic’s original vision?

Matic started with Plasma and then we incorporated a PoS bridge into our chain because of the demand from developers. We realized there is no one solution fit for all applications. With different kinds of applications, developers should have a way to choose the trade-offs. And that’s what we want to achieve with our expanded scope.

However all the existing solutions and implementations will continue to exist and operate as integral parts of this extended platform.

In this new paradigm, the $MATIC token will continue to exist and will play an increasingly important role, securing the system and enabling governance.

Doesn’t Ethereum 2.0 that can scale on its own reduce the need for Polygon?

Ethereum 2.0 doesn’t provide infinite scalability. The best case scenario is 64 shards, which is similar to today’s Ethereum chain. Assume a single chain improves with Proof-of-Stake, and has 50 transactions per second. With 64 shards, that means 3,200 transactions per second. When dapps start utilizing onchain aspects, the demand will rise, and we end up in the same position.

The costs of transactions are alarmingly high today. If they were to reduce by a factor of 50, transactions would still be costly for any dapp with meaningful adoption. Finally, Ethereum 2.0 is at least two years away, but scalability is required today.

What will be next? What core modifications do you envision for Polygon in the long-term?

We envision active governance of the network as we get further decentralised and are working on ways to empower our communities.

We are also aggressively pushing the adoption of Blockchain and Polygon with the incredible decentralized Dapps be it DeFi, NFT or Gaming and also with traditional enterprises and Web2.0 applications.

How are you going to structure governance? Do you have a plan to cope with voter’s apathy?

We haven’t explored governance actively. And that’s where we need more help from the community. Voter’s apathy is a real problem and I feel it will be a major problem when we have more protocol and platform. DAO has a major non-tech problem to solve.

According to CAP theorem there is always a choice between Availability and Consistency. What is Polygon’s approach? What factors led you to choose one over another?

Polygon chooses availability and gets eventual consistency in the current PoS network same as Ethereum. We made a design choice to replicate the same behavior as Ethereum consensus and reduce our engineering efforts at the beginning. And of course, it’s easy to implement :)

What are your plans on formal verification of the tech you’re providing to multiple protocols? How do you ensure the security of the code that already supports billions of assets?

We haven’t done formal verification but our code is audited by multiple security firms. We take security very seriously. We are also actively looking to hire security experts and strengthen our security team in-house to make sure we don’t miss out on any small thing related to security.

We’ve lost count of the number of projects Polygon has partnered with since the rebrand. What is your favourite project from the ecosystem? Which ones are particularly exciting?

But we see almost 5–10 projects launching every day, and our network has crossed 310M txns from 1.8M+ unique wallets. The list of projects on Polygon as maintained by our community can be found at https://awesomepolygon.com/

It’s tough to choose the Top 5 since there are so many high-quality projects but by users in the last 30 days, the top DeFi projects are: Quickswap, Sushiswap, Curve, Paraswap and Aave.

It seems like the Indian ecosystem is flourishing, but it’s also being hampered by regulatory uncertainty. What are your thoughts on the current state of crypto in India? How has the current crisis affected Polygon’s expansion?

The current state of crypto in India is still being discussed and researched, and there have been attempts to get more clarity on how crypto can be regulated. It does make it tricky for crypto businesses, however Polygon has remain unaffected since the crypto related activities of Polygon are taken care of my non India entities.

Aside from crypto, what is your favorite thing to do? Do you have a hobby?

I am a movie buff. I watch movies, TV series, and anime a lot. That’s my favorite thing when I am not working.

Originally published June 24, 2021. Titles, figures, product plans, and ecosystem data reflect the time of the conversation.

Part of the Paradigm Interviews archive.

🧠 Top Storylines

• Upbit Hack Fallout: A $37M exploit of Upbit’s Solana assets shakes Korean markets; emergency audits reveal a critical wallet flaw, with Lazarus Group suspected.

• ETF Momentum: Grayscale and Franklin launch XRP ETFs, each raking in $60M+ in day-one inflows. Bitwise launches a DOGE ETF on the NYSE.

• Amundi (Europe’s largest asset manager) tokenizes a money market fund on Ethereum, marking a major TradFi milestone.

• Balancer to distribute $8M in recovered funds from its prior $128M exploit.

• Kalshi surges in valuation, positioning itself as a prediction market duopoly challenger alongside Polymarket.

📉 Markets & Institutions

• Bitcoin rebounds above $91K on rate cut optimism; some analysts call it a “strong relative buy” (K33), while TD Cowen warns of premium compression.

• CryptoQuant reports BTC whales increasing exchange deposits on dips.

• Wall Street ETF inflows offer slight relief, but traders remain cautious.

• BitMine buys $44M in ETH, following Tom Lee’s bullish call.

• SpaceX moves $105M in BTC, raising treasury speculation.

• CleanSpark and Hive post record mining revenue amid AI expansion.

• Metaplanet borrows $130M against BTC to buy more bitcoin.

🏛️ Policy & Regulation

• Australia to license crypto platforms under expanded financial regime.

• Japan plans new reserve mandates for crypto exchanges.

• US Bancorp pilots stablecoin payments via Stellar.

• Texas begins building a state bitcoin reserve with a $5M IBIT buy.

• Kevin Hassett, with crypto ties, emerges as top candidate for Fed Chair.

• CFTC’s Pham seeks CEO council for crypto innovation guidance.

• Stand With Crypto launches 2026 midterm candidate survey.

💼 Deals & Companies

• Coinbase eyes RWA perpetuals and AI in 2026 investment roadmap.

• Ark Invest buys dips in Block, Circle, and Coinbase.

• Kraken launches “Krak” as a bank alternative with new features.

• Xapo Bank expands BTC credit fund and launches new wealth products.

• Animoca Brands pivots toward RWA + stablecoins ahead of a US IPO.

• Exodus acquires W3C for $175M to strengthen crypto payments.

• Securitize gains EU approval for tokenized trading on Avalanche.

🔧 Tech, Scaling & DeFi

• Ethereum raises gas limit to 60M ahead of Fusaka upgrade.

• Avail launches Nexus Mainnet, aiming to unify liquidity across chains.

• SKALE builds an AI-focused Layer 3 on Base.

• Infinex follows $67.7M Patron NFT round with new token sale via Sonar.

• DWF Labs unveils $75M DeFi fund; LayerZero and Kalshi see ecosystem buzz.

🪙 Stablecoins & Token Projects

• Klarna to issue USD stablecoin on Tempo (Stripe + Paradigm) blockchain.

• KakaoBank’s stablecoin project advances to dev stage.

• Naver + Upbit finalize mega-merger, planning $7B AI/blockchain push and local stablecoin wallet.

• Tether’s USDT stability rating cut to ‘weak’ by S&P.

• USDe TVL drops 50% amid yield compression despite usage growth.

🎯 Prediction Markets & Web3 UX

• Robinhood targets prediction markets with new derivatives exchange.

• Galaxy Digital explores Kalshi and Polymarket partnerships as LP.

• Lighter launches ZK perpetual DEX with no fees and simplified UX.

🎭 Memecoins, NFTs & Culture

• Trump-linked memecoin pumps 130% after endorsement.

• Grayscale’s DOGE ETF becomes official, citing cultural resilience.

• Do Kwon requests 5-year prison cap in ongoing $40B Terra fraud case.

🔒 Security & Legal

• Binance lawsuit claims it facilitated Hamas transactions.

• Fuse Crypto receives SEC no-action relief for green-energy token.

• JPMorgan closes Strike CEO’s accounts amid mounting compliance scrutiny.

• MegaETH to return pre-deposit bridge funds, citing sloppy execution.

TL;DR

• Futarchy and “market-based governance” move from theory to practice.

• AI agents begin trading and managing DeFi liquidity autonomously.

• Restaking debates shift toward security vs meta-governance.

• Zero-knowledge tools edge into payments and identity.

• Post-ETF cycle macro takes center stage across shows.

🎙 Bankless — How Futarchy Ends the Rug Pull Era (Oct 20 2025)

Vitalik Buterin, Glen Weyl & Justin Drake unpack whether prediction-market governance can replace token-holder politics. The hosts argue that “truth markets” may finally align incentives inside DAOs.

🎙 Bankless — Tom Lee & Arthur Hayes: How Crypto Flips Wall Street (Oct 13 2025)

Macro heavyweights map the capital rotation from TradFi to tokenized assets — and why Wall Street’s rails may end up running on Ethereum liquidity.

🎙 Unchained — Bits + Bips: Crypto Had Its Reset — Will It Make New Highs? (Oct 14 2025)

Laura Shin, Haseeb Qureshi and Robert Leshner analyze the latest drawdown, Washington politics, and how ETF inflows might reprice the entire risk curve.

🎙 Empire (Blockworks) — Crypto in 2025: Is DAT Season Over? (Oct 1 2025)

Jason Yanowitz & Santi Siri deconstruct the fading “decentralized attention token” hype and the next rotation — restaking, RWAs, and agent economies.

🎙 The Breakdown — The Short, Brutal Bear Market of the Weekend (Oct 5 2025)

NLW dissects the largest liquidation cascade since 2021, reading it as a stress test for crypto’s new restaking-driven leverage layer.

🎙 Zero Knowledge — Payy & Payy Card: The Undoxable Credit Card (Oct 15 2025)

ZK payments go practical: private, verifiable spending rails without KYC leakage. A glimpse of the post-Visa future.

🎙 Zero Knowledge — ZKPassport, Obsidion & the Emerging Noir Ecosystem (Oct 8 2025)

Identity meets privacy. Noir’s new toolset for developers brings zk-proofs to real-world credentials and governance participation.

🎙 Empire Weekly Roundups — Market Liquidations & Election Crosswinds (Oct 2025)

Fast-paced breakdowns of liquidity cycles, DAO voting shocks, and how U.S. election rhetoric is reshaping investor sentiment.

Key Takeaway

Across podcasts this month, DeFi is portrayed as a living neural network: reflexive, sentient, and politically charged. The smartest liquidity now listens, learns, and votes.

🦄🌈🤍

🏦 Markets & Macro

• Bitcoin tumbled below $108K, then bounced back above $110.5K amid rate cut hopes and US-China tensions.

• Spot Bitcoin ETFs saw $1.2B in outflows, marking the second-largest weekly loss since inception.

• Ethereum ETFs gained $170M, suggesting investors bought the ETH dip despite market turbulence.

• Analysts warn of continued volatility as macro headwinds and whale selling pressure persist.

🧠 Big Ideas & Debates

• Vitalik Buterin’s influence questioned by a former EF developer, igniting debate across crypto Twitter.

• SpaceX moved $270M in bitcoin — its first transfer since July, sparking renewed speculation on corporate treasury strategy.

• Quantum firm Project Eleven offers 1 BTC bounty to anyone who can break Bitcoin’s cryptography.

• Bitcoin mining entrepreneur pitches a 450-foot Prometheus statue on Alcatraz as a monument to BTC.

🏛️ Regulation & Policy

• Crypto groups pressure Trump to support CFPB’s open banking rule.

• SEC Chair Atkins promotes pro-innovation regulation for tokenization.

• Federal Reserve’s Michael Barr flags gaps in the GENIUS stablecoin law.

• Japan considers allowing local banks to trade crypto.

• Beijing cracks down on Chinese tech firms issuing stablecoins via Hong Kong.

• British Columbia seeks a permanent ban on crypto mining.

• Florida proposal would allow bitcoin and ETFs in state pension funds.

💼 M&A, Funding & Institutions

• Coinbase to acquire Echo for $375M, and GTreasury for $1B, building out investment & treasury arms.

• Stripe-backed Tempo raises $500M Series A, valuation hits $5B.

• Ripple leads a $1B XRP treasury initiative and buys GTreasury for treasury automation.

• MegaETH buys back 4.75% equity, and Polychain leads a $110M investment into Berachain.

• Anchorage Digital adds global USD wire transfers, pushing further into banking rails.

• Kraken acquires Small Exchange for $100M, eyes US derivatives expansion.

• A16z Crypto invests $50M in Solana’s Jito.

🌐 Ecosystems & Protocols

• Bitget Wallet integrates EIP-7702, enabling gas fee payments in stablecoins.

• Tether open-sources a multi-chain wallet kit for humans and AI agents.

• Uniswap Web App adds Solana support — bridging ecosystems.

• Yakovenko (Solana) is building a perps DEX, GitHub confirms.

• Jupiter unveils Ultra v3 with gasless trades and MEV protection.

🧱 Stablecoins, DeFi, & Tokenization

• VanEck files for a Lido staked ETH ETF, betting on SEC softening.

• BlackRock plans a GENIUS-compliant money market fund for stablecoin issuers.

• Ondo Finance calls for transparency ahead of Nasdaq’s tokenization plan.

• Zeta Network + Solv build a $230M BTC/SolvBTC treasury.

• BitMine adds $417M of ETH during the dip, continues treasury growth.

• Berachain, Tempo, and Solana projects all grow ecosystem treasuries aggressively.

⚠️ Security & Drama

• Hackers stole $3M in XRP from a U.S. wallet, per ZachXBT.

• Paxos accidentally minted 300 trillion PYUSD, blamed on a tech glitch.

• Binance bans 600+ accounts over unauthorized tools, finalizes Gopax acquisition to reenter Korea.

📈 Retail & Infra

• Gemini launches a Solana credit card with staking rewards.

• OpenSea sets Q1 2026 SEA token launch, 50% of revenue for buybacks.

• OpenSea pivots into a multi-chain trading hub.

• Coinbase’s Base App hit by an AWS outage, users reported zero balances.

🇺🇸 Politics & Culture

• Cuomo pledges crypto innovation in NY mayoral run.

• Crypto execs to meet Senate Democrats to shape market structure legislation.

• Newsmax plans a $5M Trump-token treasury.

• UK tax authority sends 65,000+ notices to suspected crypto tax evaders.

• Dogecoin treasury firm Thumzup explores DOGE rewards integration.

📉 Markets & Investment

- Spot trading volume falls to a 6-month low as traders shift to futures.

- Coinbase Institutional warns of signs of a new crypto winter.

- Auradine raises $153M Series C to boost Bitcoin mining and AI expansion.

- China’s local governments are selling seized crypto to refill public coffers.

⚖️ Regulatory & Legal

- South Korea’s central bank pledges active role in stablecoin legislation.

- Arizona advances crypto reserve bill (SB 1373 passes House committee).

- Panama City to accept crypto for taxes, permits, and fines.

- Oregon Attorney General sues Coinbase.

- Fed Chair Jerome Powell hints at possible crypto banking rule relaxations.

- Non-KYC exchange eXch to shut down under money laundering scrutiny linked to Lazarus Group.

- US Secret Service assists in recovering funds from a $4.3M Ethereum phishing scam.

🔧 Tech & Protocols

- Vitalik Buterin suggests replacing EVM with RISC-V for Ethereum scalability.

- Galaxy proposes a new market-driven voting system for Solana emissions after SIMD-228 fails.

- Aztec developer launches StealthNote for anonymous whistleblowers.

- Eliza Labs unveils auto. fun, a no-code AI agent launchpad.

🛡 Security & Crime

- Bybit CEO: 28% of $1.4B hacked crypto is "gone dark" via P2P and OTC channels.

- Brazilian Ponzi scheme: Lead launderer sentenced to 128 years in prison.

🚀 Funding, Startups & Initiatives

- Ripple backs a new XRP fund.

- Quantum computing firm Project Eleven offers 1 BTC prize to anyone who can break Bitcoin's cryptography.

📈 DeFi & Web3

- Aptos proposal aims to cut staking rewards by 3% to stimulate ecosystem development.

- Kraken launches forex perpetual futures with up to 20x leverage.

👨🏻‍💻Tech & Protocols

- MegaETH hits 20,000 TPS on public testnet day one — a new milestone for Ethereum scaling.

- Farcaster rolls out Snapchain, a blockchain-esque data layer for social dapps.

- Cosmos embraces Ethereum compatibility by open-sourcing Evmos EVM framework.

- Ethereum devs to sunset the Holesky testnet in September.

🏛 Regulation & Policy

- SEC’s crypto task force roundtable admits “current approach is clearly a failure” — future of digital asset regulation in question.

- US Treasury removes Tornado Cash from OFAC list (with nuance).

- SEC says PoW mining is not a security, clarifying a long-standing gray zone.

- Australia unveils a ‘fit for purpose’ digital asset framework, aiming to be a global crypto leader.

- OCC halts reputation risk checks, backing off pressure on banks interacting with crypto.

💰 Markets & Institutions

- Trump boosts $ TRUMP memecoin by $400M via Truth Social post.

- Fidelity unveils OnChain, Ethereum-backed shares tracking Treasury funds.

- Kraken to acquire NinjaTrader for $1.5B — the largest crypto-TradFi M&A to date.

- TON Foundation announces $400M+ in VC buys of Toncoin, powered by Telegram.

- Walrus Foundation raises $140M to expand decentralized data storage.

📉 Startups & Fundraising

- Crypto VC deals are down 60% since October, signaling market sobriety.

- UNI holders greenlight $165.5M in funding for Uniswap Foundation — potential fee switch on horizon.

- Privy secures $15M for web3 wallet UX infrastructure.

- Utila raises $18M Series A to build institutional-grade crypto wallet tech.

⚖️ Odds & Ends

- LG shutters its NFT platform, joining a growing list of Web3 retreats.

- Pump. fun launches PumpSwap to migrate memecoins from launchpad to DEX.

- Eric Trump joins Metaplanet's board, merging Bitcoin and politics.

- Bybit CEO reports $16M BTC theft routed through Wasabi mixer.

- South Korean man faces 10 years in prison for stabbing a crypto CEO mid-fraud trial.

Regulatory & Political Developments

⚫️ US Housing Dept. Explores Blockchain: ProPublica reports consideration of crypto use.

⚫️ Utah Crypto Bill Advances: Removes Bitcoin reserve provision.

⚫️ El Salvador Holds 6,111 BTC: Continues accumulation despite IMF pressure.

⚫️ Trump’s Crypto Pledge: Vows to sign stablecoin legislation before August, end debanking.

⚫️ Trump Establishes Bitcoin Reserve: Orders BTC held as a strategic asset akin to Fort Knox.

Exchanges & Corporate Moves

⚫️ Kraken Plans IPO: Targeting Q1 2026.

⚫️ Arkham Tags Crypto ‘Key Opinion Leaders’: Tracks X users with 100K+ followers.

⚫️ Ripple Co-Founder Chris Larsen Hacked: Over $100M in XRP stolen, tied to LastPass breach.

Blockchain & Infrastructure

⚫️ Base Acquires Iron Fish Team: Focus on privacy-preserving blockchain features.

⚫️ Solana Validators to Vote on SIMD-228: Proposal impacts network inflation.

⚫️ Sam Altman’s World App Expands: Adds crypto payments and chat functions.

Investment & DeFi

⚫️ a16z Crypto Backs Seismic: Leads $7M round for encrypted blockchain dev.

⚫️ Bitwise & Maple Finance Partner: Offering DeFi & on-chain credit to institutions.

⚫️ Libre Brings Institutional Funds to Injective: Backed by BlackRock, Nomura.

⚫️ David Sacks Criticizes US BTC Sales: Calls out past government handling.

⚫️ JPMorgan on Crypto Reserves: Sees <50% chance of approval.

⚫️ Skate Launches Cross-Chain AMM: Unified liquidity across Solana, Ethereum, SUI, TON & more.

Legal & Security

⚫️Yescoin Founder Arrested in Shanghai: Due to business dispute.

Regulatory & Legal Developments

-SEC Softens Stance on Memecoins: While the SEC clarified that memecoins are not automatically classified as securities, it reiterated that fraud remains a key concern.

- Coinbase Case Dropped: The SEC has officially dropped its case against Coinbase, marking a significant win for the exchange.

- Gemini Investigation Closed: Cameron Winklevoss announced that the SEC has ended its investigation into Gemini, potentially reducing legal uncertainties for the exchange.

- Richard Heart’s SEC Case Dismissed: A U.S. judge dismissed the SEC’s lawsuit against Hex and PulseChain’s Richard Heart due to jurisdictional issues.

Crypto & Political Developments

- Trump’s Crypto Reserve Plan: Trump stated that a Crypto Strategic Reserve would include Bitcoin and Ethereum.

- Coinbase CEO's Stance: Brian Armstrong responded by saying Bitcoin is the best option for such a reserve.

- Trump’s Metaverse Move: His team has filed a trademark for a ‘TRUMP’ metaverse.

- Memecoin Regulation Bill: A U.S. Congressman introduced a bill to prevent politicians from launching their own memecoins, following Trump and Melania’s token projects.

Ethereum & Blockchain Innovations

- Ethereum Foundation Leadership Changes:

- The EF appointed two co-Executive Directors.

- Former EF researcher Danny Ryan will lead the new 'Etherealize' marketing initiative.

- Bybit Hackers Move Funds: Hackers shifted over half of the stolen ETH to Bitcoin, using ThorChain for transactions.

- Ethereum Foundation Donates to Tornado Cash Dev: The EF contributed $1.25 million toward Alexey Pertsev’s legal defense.

Crypto Infrastructure & Wallets

- MetaMask Expands Support: The popular wallet is adding Solana and Bitcoin compatibility.

- Base Blockchain Speeds Up: Flashblocks has reduced Base’s testnet block time to 0.2 seconds, with mainnet rollout expected in Q2 2025.

- Uniswap Enhances Off-Ramps: Uniswap is integrating Robinhood, MoonPay, and Transak to enable easier crypto-to-fiat conversions.

Tokenization & Layer 2 Growth

- Crypto.com’s Cronos Proposal: The Cronos blockchain is considering a proposal to reissue 70 billion tokens that were previously burned.

- Robinhood CEO on Tokenization: Vlad Tenev sees tokenization as a key driver for unlocking crypto’s full potential.

- Sky’s Polaris Update: Sky introduces Polaris, a system to connect with Berachain under its ‘agent framework’ initiative.

Investment & Funding

- QuickNode’s $65M Accelerator: The program, backed by Google, Coinbase Ventures, and Dragonfly, will fund Layer 2 projects.

- Haun Ventures' $63M Investment in Raise: Raise, a payment firm working on blockchain-based gift cards, secured $63 million in funding.

- FanTV Raises $3M for AI Content Creation: The top AI project on Sui, FanTV, received funding to expand AI-driven content production.

Regulation & Policy

- CFTC to host ‘CEO Forum’ on stablecoins and collateral in a regulatory shift.

- House Republicans advance a new stablecoin regulation draft bill.

- Florida senator introduces a Bitcoin investment bill.

- SEC advances Grayscale’s Solana ETF proposal, seeking public input.

- SEC delays BlackRock’s Ethereum ETF options trading decision until April 9.

- Japan’s financial regulator asks Apple & Google to block unregistered crypto exchanges.

- Czech Republic exempts capital gains tax on crypto held for over three years.

Market & Institutions

- MicroStrategy rebrands as ‘Strategy’, reinforcing its Bitcoin focus.

- BlackRock raises its stake in Strategy (ex-MicroStrategy) to 5%.

- Cboe BZX applies to list XRP ETFs.

- Gemini considers a 2025 IPO.

Crypto & Tech

- Arweave’s AO computing platform goes live on mainnet.

- DarkFi launches its anonymous app in alpha, spearheaded by Amir Taaki.

- Berachain unveils tokenomics ahead of mainnet launch & airdrop.

- Ondo Finance expands with a new Layer 1 blockchain.

Memecoins & NFTs

- Kraken lists ‘JAILSTOOL’ memecoin, linked to Barstool’s Dave Portnoy, boosting a $200M token.

- Kanye West dismisses rumors of launching a memecoin, saying they ‘prey on the fans’.

- Sony’s Soneium drops its first music NFT collection with a crypto record label.

Legal & Enforcement

- Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev gets conditional release to work on appeal.

- Ex-Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky seeks delayed prison sentencing.

- US watchdog files complaint with DOJ & OGE over Trump’s official memecoin.

Funding & Adoption

- Reservoir, a token trading infrastructure provider, raises $14M in Series A.

- Polymarket hits 450,000 active traders, expanding beyond US election predictions.

▫️Crypto venture funding hits $4 billion in Q4 2024, led by infrastructure boom

▫️ Hong Kong launches a ‘supervisory incubator’ to guide banks in blockchain adoption.

▫️ JPMorgan predicts EU’s MiCA regulation will boost euro-denominated stablecoins.

▫️ Czech National Bank considers diversifying reserves with bitcoin purchases.

▫️ UK exempts crypto staking from collective investment scheme regulations.

▫️ South Korea plans to lift its ban on institutional cryptocurrency trading.

▫️ China sets 2029 as the target to integrate blockchain into its national data infrastructure.

▫️ Thai police seize nearly 1,000 Bitcoin mining machines over alleged energy theft.

▫️ Bhutan SAR to include BTC, ETH, and BNB in its strategic reserves.

▫️ Bitfinex moves derivatives services to El Salvador.

▫️ Singapore bans Polymarket amid a crackdown on online gambling platforms.

▫️ Coinbase subpoenaed by the CFTC over Polymarket investigation, notifying users via email.

▫️ Sony’s public blockchain platform Soneium launches on mainnet

▫️ Starknet launches SN Stack to support appchain development.

▫️ Synthetix discontinues v3 perps on Arbitrum, focusing exclusively on Base.

▫️ Polkadot’s Phala Network introduces an Ethereum Layer 2 rollup.

▫️ Revolut becomes the first bank to join the Pyth Network as a data publisher.

▫️ Animecoin, supported by Arbitrum and Azuki, announces tokenomics with over 50% allocated to the community.

▫️ Tether collaborates with AI filmmakers to enhance its brand visibility.

▫️ Aiccelerate DAO introduces a vesting structure in response to launch criticism.

▫️ Crypto thieves behind a $2.2M scam to be served a lawsuit via NFT.

▫️ Oklahoma man pleads guilty to wire fraud conspiracy in a $9.4M crypto scam.

▫️ K-pop’s Cube Entertainment CEO faces allegations of a crypto investment scam.

▫️ Operators of Blender and Sinbad crypto mixers charged with money laundering.

▫️ Movement Labs approaches the close of a $100M Series B funding round.

▫️ SoSoValue reaches a $200M valuation after raising $15M in a Series A round.

▫️ Sol Strategies secures $20M in debt financing from ParaFi Capital to expand Solana staking operations.

▫️ Framework Ventures leads a $2.5M funding round for DePIN startup Starpower.

▫️ Verifiable AI company Rena Labs raises $3.3M in pre-seed funding.

▫️ Bitcoin hits a new all-time high.

▫️ Clober (DEX) suffers $500K exploit on Base via reentrancy.

▫️ 1inch resolver contract exploited due to private key compromise.

▫️ Radiant Capital’s $50M October exploit traced to macOS malware in a zipped PDF from a fake contractor.

▫️ LastPass threat actor drains $5.4M in crypto from 40+ victims.

▫️ Tether invests in StablR to drive stablecoin adoption in Europe.

▫️ Ripple announces launch of U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin RLUSD.

▫️ Ethena’s USDtb stablecoin, backed by BlackRock’s BUIDL token, goes live.

▫️ Ohio lawmaker proposes bill for state-backed bitcoin reserve.

▫️ Wormhole, EigenLayer, and NEAR-focused Nuffle Labs partner to expand restaking beyond Ethereum.

▫️ Lido to shut down Polygon PoS staking services after community vote.

▫️ Pudgy Penguins NFT project launches PENGU token.

▫️ Omni Network launches 'Core' mainnet to unify Ethereum’s rollup ecosystem.

▫️ ENS selects Linea to build 'Namechain' Layer 2 network.

▫️ Travala announces support for sBTC and STX.

▫️ Avalanche9000 upgrade goes live, cutting costs and easing subnet launches.

▫️ Justin Sun-linked BiT Global sues Coinbase over delisting wBTC and launching a competing product.

▫️ Blockchain AI16z bot team partners with Stanford to study autonomous crypto-AI agents.

▫️ Drake's X account hacked to promote Solana memecoin.

▫️ Fantasy Top announces V2 launch and $4.25M seed funding from Dragonfly and Manifold Ventures.

▫️ SEC sued by 18 states for regulatory overreach in crypto.

▫️ Polymarket CEO raided by FBI.

▫️ US Attorney’s Office SDNY shifts focus, reducing resources spent on crypto cases.

▫️ DeltaPrime loses $4.8M in Arbitrum & alt L1 exploit; attacker stakes stolen funds.

▫️ DeFi protocol Thala recovers $25M after successful hacker negotiation.

▫️ Bitfinex hacker Ilya Lichtenstein sentenced to five years for laundering 120,000 BTC.

▫️ Netherlands-based Quantoz Payments launches MiCA-compliant stablecoins USDQ and EURQ.

▫️ Russia proposes 15% tax on crypto income from trading and mining.

▫️ Japan's Metaplanet issues $11.3M bond to purchase bitcoin.

▫️ South Korea’s Upbit under investigation for over 500,000 KYC violations.

▫️ ETH ETFs report net positive lifetime inflows.

▫️ Justin Drake suggests a beam chain upgrade by ~2029 for faster slots, finality, SNARKs, and quantum security.

▫️ ERC4337 shared user operations pool now live on Ethereum mainnet, Arbitrum, and OP Mainnet.

▫️ Ethereum-compatible Layer 1 Monad launches testnet.

▫️ Lisk migrates to OP Stack.

▫️ Dogecoin investors drop class-action lawsuit against Elon Musk.

▫️ Coinbase CEO to meet Trump about “personnel appointments” (WSJ).

▫️ Virgil Griffith to be released in April.

Hey there, crypto fam!

We’re pumped to share that Defi in Ether is heading to Bangkok for Devcon 4! If you haven’t heard, Devcon is the Ethereum community’s biggest event—a legendary gathering of devs, creators, and thinkers who are all about pushing the boundaries of decentralization. Set in the vibrant city of Bangkok, Devcon Week (November 9-17) will be packed with meetups, workshops, and insights that span the entire world of Ethereum.

One of the highlights of Devcon 4? Our own Sasha Shilina is taking the stage! Join her on November 13 at 17:20 on STAGE 6 (Kites) for a talk titled “Beyond Technology: Ethereum as the Philosophy.” This isn’t just about the tech—it’s about what Ethereum represents as a movement, and how it’s transforming how we think about community, power, and collaboration.

Let’s make Devcon 4 unforgettable! See you in Bangkok—or online!

▫️ Immutable receives Wells notice from SEC.

▫️ US Treasury discusses crypto & Treasury markets, exploring benefits/risks of tokenizing Treasuries.

▫️ Roman Storm's trial was postponed to April.

▫️ Panama Foundation vs. Cayman-BVI structure guide for token launches.

▫️ Layoffs: Consensys 20%, Kraken 15%, and dYdX 35%.

▫️ Lottie player (JavaScript animation) supply chain attack injects wallet drainer, impacts projects like 1inch.

▫️ MrBeast's on-chain activity analyzed.

▫️ UAE-based exchange M2 suffers $13.7M theft from hot wallets.

▫️ Crypto casino Metawin loses $4M in hot wallet exploit affecting Ethereum and Solana.

▫️ US government seeks return of $13M in political donations from former FTX executives.

▫️ Mt. Gox transfers 500 BTC to two unmarked wallets, according to Arkham data.

▫️ Shift4 enables merchants to accept crypto, converting and settling in fiat; pilot starts in Q4, rollout by 2025.

▫️ UBS Asset Management launches tokenized investment fund.

▫️ Base fault proofs go live, progressing toward stage 1 rollup with security council for upgrades.

▫️ Synthetix proposes acquisition of Kwenta, originally spun out in 2020.

▫️ Limit Break updates WETH, deployable on EVM chains with identical addresses.

▫️ TON Foundation launches Society DAO for decentralized governance and ecosystem growth.

▫️ Paxos partners with Singapore’s DBS Bank to launch new USD stablecoin.

▫️ Security Alliance (SEAL) releases wargames drill scenario template.

▫️ Vitalik Buterin explains Ethereum roadmap updates: 'Purge' (storage & complexity reduction) and 'Splurge' (EVM improvements, account abstraction, and obfuscation).

▫️ Ethereum researchers step down from EigenLayer advisory roles over neutrality concerns.

▫️ Ethereum-based solar project Glow raises $30M led by Framework Ventures and USV.

▫️ Ethereum scaling startup Spire Labs raises $7M in seed funding.

▫️ CMT Digital leads $2.5M pre-seed round for Axal, an autonomous agent network developer.

▫️ SEC appeals earlier Ripple ruling.

▫️ SEC approves NYSE and Cboe to list options for spot Bitcoin ETFs.

▫️ Vitalik Buterin highlights staking centralization as a major risk in Ethereum’s ‘Scourge’ outline.

▫️ Singapore’s DBS bank launches ‘Token Services’ for blockchain-based banking.

▫️ BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF attracts $1B in under a week.

▫️ Radiant Capital suffers $50M exploit on Arbitrum & BSC; 3/11 signers’ devices compromised.

▫️ Tapioca DAO prevents $2.7M (1,000 ETH) theft after an exploit drains majority of funds.

▫️ US man sentenced to 5 years for $20M crypto fraud involving fake Coinbase site.

▫️ EthOS launches dGEN1 device for onchain Ethereum interactions.

▫️ Worldcoin launches mainnet blockchain after rebranding.

▫️ Fuel Ignition (FuelVM) goes live, UTXO-based platform.

▫️ dGEN1 mobile device runs EthOS, pre-orders open via Base mint for 2025.

▫️ Towns app introduces gated group chats using River & Base.

▫️ Trump promotes World Liberty Financial token sale.

▫️ FBI arrests alleged SEC Twitter SIM swapper.

▫️ Stripe acquires stablecoin platform Bridge for $1.1B, the largest crypto acquisition.

▫️ Blockchain Capital leads $33M Series C for African stablecoin exchange Yellow Card.

▫️ zkPass raises $12.5M Series A at $100M token valuation.

▫️ Bitfinex-backed Plasma raises $3.5M to expand USDT access on Bitcoin.

▫️ Polymarket’s US presidential election betting volume surpasses $2B.