Epicenter – Podcast on Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies

Zeppelin CTO Manuel Araoz joined us to discuss smart contract security, the OpenZeppelin framework and their new project zeppelin_os.

Mance Harmon, CEO of the company behind Hashgraph, joined us to discuss the radically new consensus algorithm and how it compares to existing approaches.

Chris Burniske and Jack Tatar joined us to discuss their book 'Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond'

Our guest, Andrew Trask, is building OpenMined - a platform that merges cryptographic techniques such as homomorphic encryption and multi-party computation and blockchain technology to create the ability to train ML models with private user data. OpenMined will allow AI companies of the future to develop models, have them trained on user data without compromising user privacy, and incentivise users to train their model. We walk through the OpenMined vision and its potential impact on AI business models and AI safety

FlureeDB is a scalable graph database which provides the benefits of blockchain technologies, such as immutability, replayability and fault tolerance. Currently, in development, the goal for FlureeDB is to support various consensus rules based on the network configuration: private systems, federated (or consortium) clusters, and fully decentralized public networks.

We're pleased to be joined by Elizabeth Rossiello, CEO and Founder of BitPesa. BitPesa provides companies in frontier markets with the financial infrastructure to facilitate commerce and payments, where traditional financial markets are known to be fractured and expensive

We're joined by Christopher Fabian, Co-founder of Unicef's Innovation Unit. We discuss how the global non-profit institution leverages innovative technology to solve real-world problems in humanitarian work. We explore the different applications of blockchain in the UN and Unicef, as well as the challenges we can anticipate when deploying these technologies in the developing world. Shaun Conway, Founder of Ixo Foundation, also joins the discussion as a startup working Unicef and talks about the value of a global reputation network for humanitarian projects.

In the blockchain world, few people are as brave as Tim Swanson when it comes to busting hype. Tim's unbiased, honest, and sometimes controversial opinions provide a refreshingly realistic view of blockchain adoption and applications of this technology by people and businesses. Cutting through the hype, the over-sold press releases ad the blind optimism of a completely decentralized economy, Tim's insights provide a sobering look at the state of the blockchain.

Adam Perlow and Asher Manning of Zen Protocol joined us to discuss how Zen aims to build a decentralized financial system combining smart contracts with a Bitcoin-like UTXO architecture.

With the meteoric rise of ICOs, the questionable incentives and regulatory pitfalls of such offerings are becoming abundantly obvious. Yet, raising money from a global crowd by selling tokens is here to stay. Neufund CEO Zoe Adamovicz joined us to explain their approach to blockchain crowdfunding. By putting tokens backed by actual equity on a blockchain, they allow sales that protect investors and are accessible to non-token-based projects.

In the last few years, Chaincode Labs played one of the most active roles in the development of Bitcoin core. Its founder Alex Morcos joined us to talk about his own journey from high frequency trading to discovering Bitcoin and starting Chaincode. We talked about what drives him, what the essential characteristics of Bitcoin are and how to think about recent event like the SegWit2x controversy.

Our guests, Xinshu Dong and Amrit Kumar, walk us through the objectives, protocol design and fundraising structure of Zilliqua, a new public blockchain which achieves scalability through sharding.

The three Epicenter hosts discuss the Ethereum Developer conference, state of Ethereum ecosystem, Cosmos retreat and the Parity hack.

Micah Winkelspecht, CEO and Founder of Gem, joins us to talk about GemOS, a full-stack blockchain middleware platform that allows companies to build applications on top of blockchains protocols like Ethereum or Hyperledger Fabric.

Karl Kreder, Co-founder of Grid+, a Consensys project, joins us to talk about how blockchain technology can help disintermediate utilities and allow consumers buy electricity directly from producers. The Grid+ Agent is a hardware device which sits in your home, is connected to your energy meter and can interact with the power grid.