April turned out to be another crazy month. The world essentially shut down as it took on the Covid-19 pandemic, and there is only small light shining at the end of the tunnel as we enter May. Here at Epicenter though we tried to keep things as normal as possible and brought on a new batch of top-notch guests to the show.
🎙 Podcast episodes
To kick off the month we had Ryan Sean Adams from Mythos. Ryan is the Founder of Mythos Capital, a crypto fund and staking provider for “big fish” stakeholders. He is also the author of the popular DeFi newsletter Bankless.
Next up we had Tom Pocock and Zac Williamson, CEO and CTO, of AZTEC Protocol. AZTEC is a protocol that enables private transactions on Ethereum. Tom and Zac have visions to build a fully functional DeFi stack in which all kinds of trades, swaps, and financial operations will be possible, only with privacy built-in.
And then we were joined by Jinglan Wang and Karl Floersch from Optimism. This episode whipped up a lot of attention from listeners. Optimism is a spin-off of the Plasma Group and they’re building Optimistic Rollups, a layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum.
And to close off the month we were joined by Stani Kulechov, Founder & CEO and Marc Zeller, Integrations Lead, from Aave. Aave is an open-source and non-custodial protocol building a suite of DeFi tools for lending and borrowing on Ethereum Aave has been in the limelight recently due to the release of its Flash Loan product, an important “money lego” component that enables various new use cases in DeFi.
🏆 Tweets of the month
We were honored to sit in this list put together by ShapeShift:
We asked who you want us to have on the show and here are a few of the replies. Do you have any suggestions? Just get in touch and let us know!
No explanation needed…..
We were super happy to see Marc enjoyed the episode as much as we did!
📢 Epicenter events, news & meetups
Our hosts are getting out and about this month, virtually of course, with three of them speaking at various online events:
Ready Layer 1
Sebastien AND Brian will be speaking at this conference being planned for early May by the Web3 Foundation, Near, Cosmos, Tezos, Protocol Labs and Polkadot, all entities involved in building new blockchains designed to serve as the primary layer for distributed applications.
Bar on the Block Webinar
Brian will also be speaking at this event which brings blockchain entrepreneurs, industry experts, and innovators together to discuss the latest market developments and trends, share their expertise about the latest important topics, and explore synergies together! The topic: BITCOIN HALVING 2020
DeFi Discussions
Sunny joins a huge team of speakers at this epic event to discuss all things DeFi and Emerging Markets.
We hope to see some of you on the virtual conference trail!
Chorus One News
This month, Chorus One (where Brian is CEO & Co-founder) have launched validators on a bunch of new networks: Celo, Centrifuge and Solana. Also their staking product Anthem has launched for Cosmos, which allows people to see historic rewards and make staking transactions.
Reset Everything
As this comes out, Reset Everything, co-organised by Sebastien, just wrapped up. For two days, academics, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders explored the long-term impacts of the Covid crisis. The event was a huge success thanks to the interest and support of our listeners, and the speakers who shared their insights, expertise and vision for the future.
Here are a few interesting figures:
- 1,100 signups before the event
- About $500 in donations
- Attendance of over 400 people on day 1 and 300 people on day 2
- 35 speakers over the two days from the US, Canada, the UK, France, Argentina, Australia, India, Germany, Japan and Singapore.
If you missed the live event, you can catch up on YouTube.
🙏 Thanks to our sponsors
We would like to thank the sponsors of our shows in April: Least Authority, ShapeShift, and Status.
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