In this week’s episode I speak with Mariano Conti, the former head of smart contracts at MakerDAO. Mariano knows the value of having permissionless and uncensorable currencies first hand —he started earning in Bitcoin in 2014 in Argentina because pesos would instantly lose value and it was hard to get dollars. When he learned about Ethereum…

When Satoshi first published the Bitcoin whitepaper to the world, he titled it “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Cash System” and although Bitcoin would evolve to adopt the digital gold narrative instead, the dream of creating a fully functional digital cash system has remained. Stablecoins, defined as a subset of cryptocurrencies that are pegged to a specific…

The World Economic Forum, a bastion of the global establishment and ultra-exclusive club for heads of state, billionaires, and policymakers, is embracing DeFi. Well, sort of. In another sign that decentralized finance has spurred serious study in influential think tanks, the Geneva-based WEF issued a “Policy-Maker Toolkit.” The 38-page white paper explores DeFi’s benefits and…

Curve Finance, long distinguished by its homogenous-asset pools, has taken a walk on the wild side.  The automated market maker (AMM) rocked DeFi yesterday by releasing a pool containing USDT, WBTC, and ETH on Ethereum and another including USDC and DAI as well on Polygon. This was a first for Curve, which had up until…

Lots of laser eyes….but little actual legislation, at least for now.  El Salvador’s adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender this week has captured the imagination of lawmakers across Latin America. That’s no surprise considering the region, long plagued by underdevelopment and volatile politics, has struggled to enfranchise its citizens in the global financial system, with…

If a long bear market is truly beginning in cryptocurrencies, then be thankful for stablecoins. With the Defi Pulse Index (DPI) down 40% on the month and the overall crypto market losing a third of its market value, the stablecoin supply has continued to march upward. Stablecoin supply grew 21% in the last 30 days…

Upshot: Uniswap and PancakeSwap have become household names in decentralized exchanges but a new crop of platforms are coming online with the promise of lower fees and more pricing transparency. With gas prices making headlines throughout the first half of 2021, it’s worth taking a deeper dive into what your options are when trading across…

Ever since El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele activated his laser eyes and made Bitcoin the nation’s legal tender this week, crypto communities have been gushing about this latest milestone. But in his bid to provide his citizens with more financial freedom, did Bukele pick the wrong token?   Stablecoins — cryptocurrencies that peg their value to…

DeFi’s most well-known proprietary license is getting put to the test. A new project, Holaswap, has forked Uniswap’s V3, despite a license theoretically protecting decentralized exchange’s code from use in production settings. It’s the first major test of Uniswap’s license.  The team deployed it to protect their code and encourage the Uniswap community “to be…

Hop is a protocol for sending tokens across rollups and their shared layer-1 network in a quick and trustless manner.