Blockchain Soundbites #2
Published in
4 min readJan 20, 2020
This month features soundbites from the following leaders in the blockchain industry:
- Joe Lubin — Co-founder, ConsenSys
- Ameen Soleimani — CEO, SpankChain
- Colin Schwarz — PM, ChainSafe Systems
- David Post — Managing Director, IBM Blockchain Ventures
- Jeremey Allaire — CEO, Circle Payments
Want this delivered directly to your email? Subscribe here: https://blockchainsoundbites.substack.com
- At the Ethereal Summit in New York last month, there were a number of exciting updates and announcements coming out of projects and companies working in the Ethereum ecosystem. Joe Lubin, who is co-founder of ConsenSys, which is one of the largest blockchain companies in the world and who are building platforms, applications, and tools for the next generation of the Web called “Web 3.0”, was one of the key figures at the conference.
- Lubin sat down with Cointelegraph to talk about the current technical capacity of Ethereum, scalability, consensus protocols, public vs. private blockchains for businesses looking to integrate the technology, and what awaits the ecosystem in the near future.
- We got a Repost from ConsenSys and a Like from the man himself (below) which really helped drive exposure for this Tweet and pick up a few new followers and subscribers and subscribers to the weekly newsletter.
- Ameen Soleimani is an interesting character. In his recent conversation on the EthHub podcast he spoke candidly about the challenges the adult entertainment industry faces and how his company, SpankChain, are helping to solve them.
- They are building infrastructure to onboard the adult entertainment industry to their platform and to cryptocurrency. This infrastructure includes layer 2 payment technology they have developed with Connext, SpankPay which is a crypto payment processor like BitPay, as well as a clips site which will allow performers to sell their content. This is all being built on the Ethereum mainnet.
- Before SpankChain, when Ameen was trying to think of use cases for micro payments while working at ConsenSys, he was originally interested in education e.g. real-time pay per minute for tutoring, but he realised that a lot of things start in the adult industry and so maybe porn was a good first use case.
Check out the podcast on EthHub here.
- With Ethereum 2.0 or ‘Serenity’ — the 4th stage of development for the world’s first smart contract blockchain — in full swing at the moment, I thought it would be helpful to call out the 3 stages that came before it.
- ChainSafe Systems, based in Toronto, are one of 8 teams building clients for Ethereum 2.0 (outlined in Joe’s tweet above). Colin Schwartz, a project manager working in ChainSafe, wrote a very in-depth and insightful Medium blog post on a complete guide to Ethereum 2.0, where he described the 3 phases that got us to where we are today as well as the challenges facing the developers as they build out the ambitious 4th and tentatively final phase of Ethereum’s architecture.
Check out the full blog post here.
- David Post is managing director of IBM’s Blockchain Ventures. He recently spoke on the ‘Off the Chain’ podcast where he outlined IBM’s involvement in the enterprise blockchain space.
- He said at IBM they believe that blockchain will do for businesses what the internet did for communication. He also said that crypto economics are going to come in and allow private permissioned networks to decentralise. He said it is unlikely that the likes of Hyperledger and other permissioned blockchains are in their final states, and there is a path to a decentralise these blockchains in the future.
Check out the interview with ‘Pomp’ here.
- The CEO of Circle, Jeremy Allaire, spoke just after the announcement of Facebook’s Libracoin announcement.
- Like many of his peers such as Michael Novogratz, Barry Silbert and Joseph Lubin, he believes this is positive for the crypto industry as it will help with the movement towards decentralised platforms and open finance.
Check out the full article with Bloomberg here.
