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Alkimiya: Blockspace, the Digital Real Estate - Leo Zhang

Episode Summary

We were joined by Leo Zhang, founder of Alkimiya, to discuss the precious, limited resource that everyone competes for, when interacting with a blockchain: blockspace!

Episode Notes

As the crypto industry matures, more sophisticated market participants become involved. As a result, risk management and hedging will evolve to levels seen in TradFi. However, regardless of the preferred market activity, when interacting with a blockchain, every actor competes for the same limited blockspace. Based on demand levels, the cost for securing that blockspace can fluctuate (in the form of miner fees for Bitcoin transactions, or gas fees for PoS blockchains). Therefore, a particular niche of power users could lower these costs by reserving blockspace in advance of elevated demand levels. Alkimiya set out to build just that - a marketplace for blockspace.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Leo’s background
• The vision behind Alkimia
• Market participants for blockspace
• Hedging costs
• Use cases on Ethereum
• Proposer-Builder Separation and preconfirmations
• Reserving blockspace
• Polkadot’s blockspace allocation
• Current market sentiment. ETH vs. SOL

Episode links:

• Leo Zhang on Twitter
• Alkimiya on Twitter

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
• Chorus1: Chorus1 is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.