12 February 2020
Epicenter monthly update for January
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As we close out the first few weeks of 2020, here’s our first monthly update of the year! From one guest speaking of his time in prison, to another filling us in on his background in the CIA, we really covered a lot of ground last month on Epicenter!
Podcast episodes
We kicked off the new year with Charlie Shrem, who we like to think of as a Bitcoin pioneer and renegade. Charlie became fascinated with Bitcoin in 2011 and created BitInstant in 2012. His company quickly grew and by 2013 became responsible for processing a third of all Bitcoin transactions. As we all know, the success of BitInstant was short-lived… Our conversation with Charlie recounts the Bitcoin industry in its infancy, his time in prison, and what he is doing now that he’s able to continue his work as a Bitcoin advocate.
Next up was Dillon Chen from Edgeware, a smart contract platform built on Polkadot’s Substrate. Focused on developing community-owned governance tools, Edgeware is a distributed project where participants use the tools themselves to vote, delegate, and fund each other to upgrade the network. While initially developed by Commonwealth Labs, Edgeware at launch will be entirely managed by the community, which holds 90% of the tokens and resulting influence.
After a few missed attempts, we finally managed to get Steven Kokinos and Silvio Micali, from Algorand, on the show. While many believe that it is not possible for a blockchain, without additional layer solutions, to maximize scalability, security, and decentralization, Algorand believes they are well on the way to solving the Trilemma without compromise.
Silvio Micali, Algorand’s Founder and Head of Research, as well as the company’s CEO, Steven Kokinos, discuss the project’s background, recent protocol upgrades, and how Algorand will create a great ecosystem for developers.
And in our final episode in January we were joined by Yaya Fanusie. Yaya’s background as an intelligence analyst at the CIA, and research on the national security implications of cryptocurrencies, provide valuable insight into the necessity of regulation in the space to mitigate the risk of bad actors. Yaya discusses the history and evolution of “Know Your Customer” and where he believes the industry is heading as it faces policymakers who attempt to regulate such rapid technological change.
Epicenter events, news & meetups
- Join Sebastien, Sunny and Friederike at EthCC in Paris from March 2nd to 8th. They will also be hosting a casual drinks meetup on Wednesday March 4th.
- Sunny is at EthDenver 2020 February 14th to 16th. Be sure to go say hi!
- You can also catch Sebastien at Paris Blockchain Summit at the end of March.
Tweets/post of the month
And we received this email which gave all of us here at Epicenter all the feels:
Development updates
In case you hadn’t already noticed, we recently launched our new website. We are still making some last updates to it so keep an eye out for some new exciting features! Let us know what you think!
Sponsors
We would like to thank the sponsors of our shows in January, Cosmos, Pepo and Status.