It seems like it was just yesterday that we released the first episode, where Brian and Sebastien give their predictions for Bitcoin in 2014 (here is the episode if you want to have a good laugh). Yes, today Epicenter is turning 5 years old!
When the podcast began, it was an experiment. Brian and Sebastien were both just entering the space and saw hosting a podcast as a great learning opportunity. Neither of them expected this would go on for five years! But as the audience grew, and people kept tuning in every week, it became clear we had stumbled onto something which people found valuable.
Which brings us to 2018: an amazing year for Epicenter and the team. While we remain steadfast to our mission of providing high-quality interview about blockchain and cryptocurrencies to our listeners, a lot has changed at Epicenter in the past year.
The team doubled in size
One of the first big changes is the expanded Epicenter family! The last time we added a new co-host was in 2015 when Meher Roy joined Brian and Sebastien. We were due for a few new faces.
In April 2018, Brian invited Sunny Aggarwal, with whom he had worked at Tendermint, to join as a co-host. A longtime fan of the show, Sunny was elated to join, and hosted his first episode in May, an interview on Cardano with Charles Hoskinson. Sunny brings in-depth technical knowledge to the podcast.
Fast forward to October, we expanded once again, this time being joined by Friederike Ernst, COO at Gnosis. Friederike recorded her first episode, an interview with Aleksandr Bulkin and Jake Brukhman from CoinFund. With a Ph.D. in physics and as a former academic, Friederike is extremely sharp and brings a highly analytical point of view to the host roster.
Beyond the hosts, there are a lot of people who make Epicenter work behind the scenes. Ola Kohut joined us in February 2018, to help with community management and audience growth. Anna Harbaum also joined this year as a part-time accountant. And closing out the newest addition of the year, Peta Armstrong, joined in October as a production assistant.
While the team grew a lot in 2018, it’s worth mentioning two people who have been playing important roles behind the scenes for years. Shinoj Abraham, who brings you our signature polygon cover art, celebrated 3 years with Epicenter in April.
And for the podcast’s amazing sound and production quality, we have to thank Vedran Dzampo for his hard work and dedication. Vedran was the first person to join Epicenter and February will mark his fifth anniversary with the show.
The podcast grew
2018 was also by far the best year in terms of the audience we reached. If we combine audio and video, we came up just shy of 2 million plays. Since the podcast began, the video and audio versions combined have generated over 4.2 million hits!
Our all-time top 5 episodes were:
- Chris Burniske & Jack Tatar: Cryptoassets — The Rise of a New Asset Class (#218)
- Gavin Wood: Substrate, Polkadot and the Case for On-Chain Governance (#259)
- Aleksandr Bulkin & Jake Brukhman: CoinFund — Crypto-Investing by Community Building (#256)
- Kathleen Breitman & Arthur Breitman: Tezos — The Long Road Towards A Digital Commonwealth (#255)
- Kevin Owocki: Gitcoin — Aligning Incentives in Open-Source Development (#257)
This was our most popular Tweet ever:
According to Hive’s crypto score algorithm, our most influential Twitter follower are:
While we had a great year, not everything was a bed of roses. After 252 straight weeks of never missing an episode, for the first time, we… failed to release a new episode 😵😵😵. Instead, we rebroadcast one of our favorite episodes, a discussion on revolutionizing democracy using DAOs with Ralph Merkle. 😄
Now those may have been our most popular episodes from the year. But what about our personal favorites? Let’s check in with each of the hosts!
“While I had a lot of really fun episodes this year, I think my personal favorite was with Grigore Rosu on the K Framework. It was just such a technical topic that I didn’t really understand going into the interview, but by the end, Professor Rosu was able to explain it so well, that I felt I had really learned something in the 1 hour!”
— Sunny Aggarwal
“There were so many great episodes this year! But I think my personal favorite would have to be our interview with Eric Larchevêque of Ledger. It’s full of amazing anecdotes and really great takeaways on how to build a successful company.”
— Sebastien Couture
“My favorite episode was the one with CZ from Binance. The speed at which Binance built a super successful company is just beyond comprehension. I most vividly remember CZ explaining how they went from first considering the ICO to finishing it within two weeks! Astonishing.”
— Brian Crain
“My personal favorite is the episode with Gavin Wood. It’s rare that technical virtuosity and storytelling ability blend so well in one person.”
— Meher Roy
“My favorite episode was 🥁 bloxroute because layer 0 scaling gets talked about too little. I was also super stoked to join as co-host!”
– Friederike Ernst
We hosted events and meetups
This year, Epicenter tried something new: stepping out of the digital world and into the physical one. In May, we held our first edition of Epicenter Insights, a debate panel with leading minds from the crypto community in Berlin, focused on uncovering the big picture of the decentralization efforts in the Web 3.0 space. You can read the event summary and watch the video recording here.
Next, in September, along with Dekrypt Capital we co-hosted the SF Blockchain Week: Epicenter conference with over 3000 attendees and 100+ speakers! Recordings of the many great talks from this event can be found here:
Finally, we threw our last physical meetup of the year. During Devcon4 in Prague, we hosted a drinks meetup on Halloween night and got a chance to meet and hangout with listeners.
We added new features
We also rolled out a number of new “features” and improvements this year. One of the most frequent things people asked us was to be listed on Spotify. We finally got listed a few months ago and have seen steady growth on that platform.
Furthermore, we’ve begun releasing episode transcripts for people who are more reading learners than auditory learners. You can read more about this here:
Finally, we’ve launched our Gitter community, where you can drop by to talk about the show, leave your feedback, share ideas & suggestions.
In closing
Doing this podcast has been an incredible learning experience. It has taken us all around the world and allow us to meet many incredible people. For that, we’re immensely grateful.
To our fans, thank you for tuning in every week. We continue to be humbled by the love and support we receive from our listeners. To our many guests, thank you for being part of the journey and for helping create an amazing experience for the people who are passionate about this community.
Of course, our sponsors play a huge role as well. Thank you to Microsoft, Toptal, Gnosis, and Shapeshift for sponsoring this year, and to all of those who have supported the podcast in the past.
We are looking forward to 2019 and how to take Epicenter to the next level. We’ve been toying around with some new ideas and formats and look forward to sharing them with you all soon!
Your friends at the Epicenter team
Oh, and one last announcement! There is another new member of the Epicenter family we forgot to mention. On November 6, Meher and his wife had their first child and Zubin Roy entered the world!
