🎙️ METACAST: Top Crypto Podcasts of February 2024

Paradigm

Published in

Paradigm

16 min readMar 4, 2024

Greetings, everyone!

Take a swift glimpse at the highlights of what we’ve been tuning into last month!

TL;DR

Part 2 of Vitalik’s Endgame, where Vitalik’s nominees and Ethereum Foundation Researchers, Mike Neuder & Domothy, walk us through the updated Ethereum Roadmap.
Ethereum researcher Justin Drake explores solutions to Ethereum’s fragmentation and composability challenges.
Ryan and David of Bankless discuss investing wisdom from Chris Burniske, the impact of restaking summer on ETH, and Vitalik’s “end of my childhood” post.
Bitcoin wizard, David Seroy, joins Bankless to discuss Bitcoin Layer 2 solutions. Are they real? David’s got answers.
Muneeb explores Bitcoin’s Layer 1 and Layer 2 advancements, scaling solutions, and BitVM’s potential.
Eli Ben-Sasson defends Starknet’s airdrop decisions and rationale.
Abdel Bakhta, Head of Ecosystem at Starkware, discusses the origins of Starkware, how its culture has evolved, and the Starkware Project Alpha.
Hart Lambur from UMA introduces Oval, a new DeFi primitive, and discusses recapturing billions in DeFi liquidations. Hasu joins to discuss the impact of MEV share from Flashbots.
Beff Jezos (Guillaume Verdon) explains the core pillars of the e/acc movement and why speeding up AI progress is essential.
Sandy Kaul, SVP at Franklin Templeton, discusses the company’s bullish stance on crypto and its BTC ETF.
Sreeram Kannan, founder of Eigenlayer, answers questions sourced from Crypto-Twitter about Eigenlayer.
Mike Belshe, CEO of BitGo, discusses recent developments like acquiring Brassica, investment from Brinks, and tokenization.
John Wu, president of Ava Labs, outlines Avalanche’s unique features, plans for scaling to 100K TPS, partnerships with JPMorgan and Amazon Web Services.
James Murphy, former securities lawyer, discusses the outcomes of SEC lawsuits against Ripple XRP and Coinbase, Gary Gensler’s crypto stance, and US crypto regulations.
Aaron Kaplan, Co-CEO of Prometheum, talks about Prometheum’s Ethereum custody launch, plans for XRP support, SEC approvals.
Dan Romero shares insights into Farcaster’s growth, philosophy, and plans.
Dylan Abruscato, Tyler Cagle, and Bryan Lee reflect on the unexpected outcomes of Crypto: The Game.
Lucas, the CEO of Jito Labs, discusses Solana’s recent network outage, improvements, and future promise.
Meow responds to criticisms of JUP’s airdrop launch and discusses Jupiter’s future plans.
Brendan Farmer, co-founder of Polygon, discusses the project’s focus on scaling Ethereum.
Zero Knowledge hosts speak with Noam Nisan, Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Principle Researcher at StarkWare Industries, about his work in Algorithmic Game Theory and PoS tokenomics.
Brian Weickmann & Richard Liang from the ZKP2P project discuss the opportunities and challenges of building ZK applications with current tools.
Gil and Yair discuss Lava Network’s decentralized marketplace for RPC and node providers within the modular, multi-chain landscape.
Zhiming Yang, co-founder of Orbit Markets, discusses crypto derivatives and how traditional finance expertise applies to customizing structured products for crypto markets.
David Goldberg, founder of Founders Pledge, discusses the landscape of charitable non-profit organizations.
Lefteris Karapetsas, a veteran in the Ethereum ecosystem, shares his 10-year journey from joining EthDev (pre-Devcon 0) to founding Rotki, a portfolio tracking and accounting tool for cryptocurrencies.
Alex Blania, co-founder of Worldcoin, discusses Worldcoin’s ambition to become the world’s largest digital identity and financial network.
Luca Netz, the new owner of Pudgy Penguins, walks us through his journey, from a less-than-ideal childhood to a full-blown NFT empire.
And more.

Unchained

Stacks’ Muneeb Ali On Why Bitcoin Is Exciting Once Again: Fifteen years after the birth of Bitcoin, the network is now entering an era of remarkable innovation and change, according to Stacks’ co-creator Muneeb Ali. On this episode of Unchained recorded at the Bitcoin Builders conference, Muneeb explores the complexities and advancements within Bitcoin’s Layer 1 and Layer 2. He shares his perspectives on what’s fueling innovation in Bitcoin’s Layer 1 and discusses the implications of Ordinal Inscriptions amid criticism of it by core developers. He delves into the various scaling solutions within Bitcoin, highlighting how trust assumptions vary among them, and how BitVM could be a ‘game changer’. He goes over the advantages of integrating smart contracts on Bitcoin, and why he considers BTC the only true form of monetary asset.

Why the Celestia Team Sees a Future With 10,000 Roll-Ups: Celestia, a data availability layer for blockchains, was launched last October to much fanfare. The platform takes a modular approach to blockchains, allowing developers to post data onto it without the need for smart contracts or execution. This makes it extremely useful for scaling roll-ups and other layer two technologies. Celestia co-founder Mustafa Al-Bassam and COO Nick White join Unchained to discuss what Celestia is and how it works, how data availability sampling allows for more scalability, how Celestia compares with other data availability layers, whether Celestia could become a data availability layer for Bitcoin, and comparisons between Celestia and Solana.

Is the Short Team Lockup for STRK ‘Misaligned’? No, Says Starkware CEO: Starknet made news for announcing what will be the largest initial airdrop by number of eligible addresses ever. But it faced heavy criticism online for many of the details of the airdrop, from the fact that Ethereum solo takers received almost 22% of the distribution to eligibility requirements that users held at least 0.005 ETH in their wallets as of Nov. 15, 2023, to the fact that the token generation event took place almost two years before the unlock date. Starkware CEO Eli Ben-Sasson joined Unchained to respond to the multiple critiques of the airdrop and discuss why he and the Starknet Foundation decided on the details that they did.

How Decentralized Social Network Farcaster Hopes to Eventually Get to One Billion Users: In the two weeks since Farcaster introduced its Frames feature that allows developers to easily add mini apps to users’ posts, the decentralized social network has become the talk of Twitter, now X, and increased its user base by ten times, according to co-founder Dan Romero. Romero joins Unchained to discuss why Frames has become so popular, the philosophy behind Farcaster and its client Warpcast, why the crypto component behind Farcaster is being kept to a minimum, how Apple’s new Vision Pro could lead to the creation of a 3D social network on Farcaster, how he and his fellow co-founder’s background at Coinbase helped shape their decisions about building Farcaster, and his vision for eventually getting Farcaster to a billion-plus users.

How Crypto’s Version of ‘Survivor’ Ended Up With the Most Heartwarming Ending: Crypto: The Game captivated a large swath of the crypto community. The game, modeled after “Survivor,” was the brainchild of Dylan Abruscato, Tyler Cagle and Bryan Lee. The intention of the game, which was played virtually but also unfolded in real life, was to ruthlessly vote people off to determine a single winner. Throughout, multiple psy-ops operations created chaos. Despite all that, the competition ended up fostering numerous friendships (including for Unchained reporter Sage Young, whose coverage is below) and resulted in a shocking, but heartwarming ending. On Friday afternoon, after the winner was announced, Unchained hosted a Spaces with Dylan, the winner, and some of the more notable players, which they’re releasing here.
Why One Solana Builder Is Still Optimistic About the Network: Last month, Solana suffered a network outage, just shy of a year since its last shutdown. The blockchain had to quickly get a new version out and notify its validators to upgrade to it and restart their systems before blocks could be produced again, resulting in downtime of roughly five hours. This was previously something that had happened regularly to the blockchain but seemed to have been largely addressed over the past year. Lucas, the CEO of Jito Labs, which builds infrastructure for Solana and staged a highly successful airdrop last year that helped rejuvenate the blockchain, joined Unchained to discuss what caused the outage, whether it’s something that builders on Solana should be concerned about for the future, recent improvements Solana has made to its technology, whether the implementation of Firedancer would have prevented this incident, and the promise of the Solana phone.
2 Lawyers on How the U.S. Can Finally Regulate DeFi: Trying to regulate DeFi is a huge challenge because, in a truly decentralized system, there should be no centralized actors to make and enforce rules for. This could make combating illicit finance challenging since traditionally, regulation has been targeted at centralized intermediaries. Yet Rebecca Rettig, Chief Legal and Policy Officer at Polygon Labs; Michael Mosier, the co-founder of boutique law firm Arktouros; and Katja Gilman, senior lead for public policy at Polygon Labs, published a paper that proposes to do just that. Rebecca and Michael join Unchained to discuss what prompted them to write the paper, what the difference is between “onchain CeFi” and “genuine DeFi,” how targeting high-risk wallets can be one part of the solution, how critical communications transmitters (CCTs) are another piece of the puzzle, and what next steps they are pursuing.
Jupiter Founder Meow to Critics of JUP Airdrop: ‘Give Me a Break’: While Solana DeFi protocol Jupiter staged what was by most measures a very successful airdrop launch on Wednesday, achieving a market cap of close to $800 million, the company’s critics pointed out numerous ways the company seemed to unfairly enrich itself in the process. While Jupiter’s founder, who goes by the pseudonym Meow, acknowledges he might have done some things differently, he finds the criticisms of the launch mostly based on “bad faith” and misinformation. Meow joined Unchained to discuss the thinking behind the launch mechanics of JUP, how the prior launch of memecoin WEN served as a dry run for JUP, whether the aggressive pricing strategy of JUP was a mistake, and what he hopes to achieve with Jupiter next, including the possibility of enabling companies of all kinds to list themselves publicly on chain.

The Chopping Block:

The Chopping Block: Starknet’s Airdrop, Founder Challenges, and Ethena’s Mainnet: Welcome to The Chopping Block — where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and special guest Dan Romero, co-founder of Farcaster, engage in a riveting discussion on decentralized social media and the burgeoning meme coin trend within the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
The Chopping Block: Navigating the New Era of Crypto Social Media with Farcaster’s Insights
The Chopping Block: Is Farcaster the Web3 Social Layer?
The Chopping Block: Points or Airdrops, Which Is the Better Engagement Model for Crypto Projects?

Bankless

Endgame 2.0: A Guide to Vitalik’s Ethereum Roadmap with Mike & Dom: Welcome to Part 2 of Vitalik’s Endgame, where Vitalik’s nominees and Ethereum Foundation Researchers, Mike Neuder & Domothy walk us through the updated Ethereum Roadmap. This roadmap is composed of 6 urges: — The Merge: Proof of Stake — The Surge: Improve throughput and DA — The Scourge: MEV — The Verge: Running validator anywhere with Verkle Trees — The Purge: Eliminate technical debt — The Splurge Fix everything else.

Fixing Fragmentation with Justin Drake: The Ethereum Ecosystem is going through Fragmentation, can we make it more Composable? The hosts brought on Ethereum researcher Justin Drake to explore this question in detail. They cover deep topics like Universal Synchronous Composability, Shared Sequencing and Based Rollups. Justin explores the solution for which might be Ethereum’s Hardest Challenge and its roadmap.

Why e/acc Is Right with Beff Jezos (Guillaume Verdon): One guest, two identities. Beff Jezos (Guillaume Verdon) is a founding father of the e/acc movement, a physicist, a quantum researcher, and the founder of an AI startup called Extropic. Beff thinks AI doomers are not only wrong, but they’re taking humanity in the worst possible direction. Growth. Acceleration. Progress. These are the core pillars of the e/acc movement. Instead of slowing down on AI progress, Beff explains why we should be speeding up.
Is DA a Good Business Model? — Neel Somani & Jon Charbonneau: What’s Data Availability (DA) and what’s its Business Model? In this episode the hosts welcomed by Jon Charbonneau, researcher-investor at DBA and Neel Somani, CEO of Eclipse.

The LRT Episode: Welcome to the LRT episode, covering the entire playing field of liquid restaking projects and what makes each one unique and special. On the show the hosts have representatives from Ion, Ether.fi, Puffer, Kelp, Swell and Renzo making this your one stop to go from zero to expert on the restaking landscape.
Are Bitcoin L2s Real? with David Seroy (Bitcoin Dave): On this episode, the hosts have Bitcoin wizard, David Seroy on the show. He’s an armchair researcher in the Bitcoin rollup ecosystem. He really likes Bitcoin, and he really likes projects that are building on Bitcoin. They’ve got a lot of questions on Bitcoin today, especially those that revolve around Bitcoin L2s. Are they real? David’s got answers.

The Culture of Starknet with Abdel Bakhta: The hosts have a classic LayerZero style episode with nonother than Abdel Bakhta. Abdel is the Head of Ecosystem at Starkware and is onboarding new species to the Least Aligned L2, Starknet. They cover the origins of Starkware and how its culture has evolved, there’s also a ton of Starkware Project Alpha on this episode so stay tuned.

Starknet Token Launch Is Here! ($STRK): The Stark token is here. A total of 1.3 Million wallets are eligible to receive the $STRK token, are you one of them? Joining the hosts today is Starkware founder and CEO Eli Ben-Sasson, and Starknet CEO Diego Oliva who are here to walk us through all you need to know about the big launch.
A Conversation with Michael Ippolito: David livestreams with Blockworks’s Mike Ippolito in a freestyle conversation covering all things crypto.
The Pudgy Penguins Comeback Story with Luca Netz: They’re joined by Luca Netz, the new owner of Pudgy Penguins. Luca walks us through his story of how he got here, from a less than ideal childhood, to a full blown NFT empire. In addition to a massive new deal with Walmart, he also lays out the case for why he thinks the bright future for Pudgy Penguins has only just begun.
Hasu & Hart on Oval & The Recapturing of Billions in DeFi Liquidations: Today on the show, we’re talking about Oval, a new DeFi primitive that Hart Lambur from UMA is introducing to the world of DeFi’s biggest lending markets. Billions of dollars have been liquidated from protocols like Aave, Compound, and MakerDAO over the years, and these liquidations have been extremely inefficiently priced, due to reasons! Reasons that we will discuss here on the show today. Hasu also joins us on this conversation today to discuss the way that MEV share from Flashbots is a part of this conversation, and he helps illuminate what this means for DeFi going forward as a whole.
Restaking Summer & What it Means For Ethereum: In this episode of Bankless Takes, Ryan and David discuss the incredibly valuable investing wisdom from Chris Burniske, restaking summer…what’s the impact to ETH, and Vitalik’s end of my childhood post.

Farcaster’s Big Moment with Founder Dan Romero: Farcaster is a twitter-like crypto social media app that just launched what could prove to be a killer new feature. They’re called frames.

$1.5T Franklin Templeton’s Massive Bet on Crypto with SVP Sandy Kaul: Franklin Templeton is a TradFi company with $1.5 trillion in assets. The hosts brought on their SVP Sandy Kaul, who is a turbo crypto bull. What’s Franklin Templeton? It’s an investment management company (think mutual funds, ETFs) that manages over $1.5 Trillion in assets. This is what we in crypto affectionately refer to as TradFi and they recently came out with a BTC ETF and have big plans for future tokenization. They also seem to be incredibly bullish on crypto and this new intersection between crypto and TradFi.

Eigenlayer Q&A with Founder Sreeram Kannan: What are the biggest questions that people have about Eigenlayer? David sourced these questions from Crypto-Twitter, and will be asking Sreeram LIVE.
The $JUP Airdrop with Jupiter founder Meow: $JUP has landed. What does the future have in store for Jupiter? How will the decentralization of Jupiter begin? All these questions, and more, with the founder of Jupiter.

Rollups:

Zero Knowledge

Episode 312: ZKP2P with Brian & Richard: In this episode, Anna and Tarun interview Brian Weickmann & Richard Liang from the ZKP2P project. They cover the opportunities and challenges of building ZK applications with the current tools available, as well as revisit the topic of ZK Email and explore how this lies at the heart of the current version of ZKP2P. They also discuss the goals of ZKP2P, what’s happening under the hood, the types of experiments and initiatives the project is running, how a user can already use the existing product and the opportunities systems like ZKP2P open up.

Episode 311: The Launch of Celestia and Beyond: In this episode, Anna and Guillermo chat with Yaz Khoury and Ismail Khoffi from Celestia. They share how the team prepared for the launch of the Celestia mainnet and what has been happening at Celestia since. They revisit the topic of DA (Data Availability) and explore how rollups and dApp developers can already use the Celestia DA layer. The group discusses Blobstream, which brings the benefits of Celestia to Ethereum and helps to scale the network, as well as community building, the modular thesis and much more.

Episode 310: Algorithmic Game Theory & PoS Tokenomics with Noam Nisan: In this episode, Anna and Tarun chat with Noam Nisan, Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Principle Researcher at StarkWare Industries and one of the pioneers in the field of Algorithmic Game Theory. They cover his extensive research and academic background, starting with his work on complexity theory as well as Algorithmic Game Theory and his current work on blockchains and Tokenomics at StarkWare. They discuss his recent blog post; Simple Tokenomics for a Proof-of-Stake Utility Token, comparing the measurable Tokenomic outcomes of different live PoS systems and explore how Noam aimed to better communicate best practices for those designing these systems, plus much more.

Epicenter

Gil Binder & Yair Cleper: Lava Network — Decentralising RPC and Node Providers: Gil and Yair to discuss Lava Network’s decentralised marketplace for RPC and node providers in the modular, multi-chain landscape.
Zhiming Yang: Orbit Markets — Crypto Derivatives and Structured Products: Zhiming Yang, co-founder of Orbit Markets, discuss crypto derivatives and how TradFi expertise applies to customising structured products for crypto markets.
David Goldberg: Founders Pledge — Maximising Charity Efficiency & Impact: David Goldberg, founder of Founders Pledge, discuss the landscape of charitable non-profit organisations and how data can streamline donations and maximise their social impact.
Lefteris Karapetsas: Rotki — From Ethereum Devcon 0 to Building Rotki: Lefteris Karapetsas, true Ethereum OG, discuss his 10-year long journey through the Ethereum ecosystem, from joining EthDev (pre-Devcon 0) to founding Rotki.

The Defiant

Polygon’s Plan for a Simplified Blockchain Experience: Brendan Farmer is the co-founder of Polygon, which is a project that is focused on scaling Ethereum. Brendan’s contributions have been instrumental in the research and development of key scaling technologies within Polygon’s framework, including Polygon PoS, Polygon zkEVM, and Polygon Miden. This conversation begins with an exploration of the foundational elements that constitute the Polygon ecosystem. They then delve into the realm of ZK technology, discussing its advantages as a preferred scaling solution, its comparison with optimistic rollups, and the intricacies of Polygon’s Aggregation Layer and CDK.

Crypto’s Most Dystopian Project? Worldcoin Deep Dive with Alex Blania: Alex Blania is a cofounder of Worldcoin alongside Sam Altman and Max Novendtsern. Worldcoin is aiming to become the world’s largest digital identity and financial network, giving ownership to everyone. Worldcoin could be considered the frontrunner in terms of ambition, leveraging unique methods to accelerate the widespread adoption of cryptocurrency technologies globally, to a point where critics have labelled it as “dystopian”.

How Terra is Trying to Rise from its Ashes with Terraform Labs’ New CEO Chris Amani: The conversation with Chris unfolds in two parts. Initially recorded on January 17th, they begin by catching up on the latest developments and the new strategic direction of the Terra ecosystem following its collapse in May 2022. Intriguingly, just days after our initial dialogue, Terraform Labs announced its filing for bankruptcy. In the latter part of our discussion, we delve into the intricacies of this voluntary decision to explore the potential implications and expected outcomes stemming from the bankruptcy filing.