Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies
Epicenter brings you in-depth conversations about the technical, economic and social implications of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies. Every week, we interview business leaders, engineers academics and entrepreneurs, and bring you a diverse spectrum of opinions and points of view. Epicenter is hosted by Sebastien Couture, Brian Fabian Crain, Friederike Ernst, Meher Roy and Felix Lutsch. Since 2014, our episodes have been downloaded over 8 million times.
Episodes
Quantum computing is often dismissed as a distant sci-fi future, but Ethereum OG John Lilic and Oxford physicist Stefano Gogioso argue the timeline is shrinking fast with roadmaps converging around 2030. In this episode, they break down the "woeful" state of quantum readiness in crypto, explaining how Shor's algorithm could eventually shatter the elliptic curve cryptography protecting Bitcoin and Ethereum.
They also ex...
“DevConnect 2025 was about touching and feeling Ethereum IRL”Nathan Sexer, lead of the DevConnect 2025 and Events team at the Ethereum Foundation, gives a peek into the largest iteration of Devconnect ever, with 20,000 attendees, and why the team pivoted to a "World's Fair" format, creating tangible districts for DeFi and Privacy to let attendees truly "touch and feel" the ecosystem.
The conversation gets rea...
At DevConnect 2025, Sebastian and Friederike speak with Peter Van Valkenburgh about the rapidly evolving battle for digital rights. Peter challenges the industry's comfort with transparency, arguing that "transparency will destroy neutrality." He uses the history of SWIFT to illustrate how a once-neutral messaging system was captured by geopolitical interests because it wasn't "technically blind" to the data it processed. He argues...
Captured live at Cosmoverse 2025, this episode brings host Sebastian in conversation with Michael (better known as Cryptocito, Cosmos investor via Cito Ventures) and Magnus (@0xMagmar, Co-CEO Cosmos Labs).
Against a backdrop of institutional gravitas, central banks mingling alongside Revolut executives, the conversation traces Cosmos' arc across five Cosmoverses, from Medellín's raw developer fervor to the polished, enterprise-orie...
Brian Fabian Crain and Michael Egorov, Curve Finance founder, discuss Curve's origins: solving inefficient DAI/USDC swaps after MakerDAO borrows by creating a DeFi AMM for stablecoins and LSTs.
It hit 1M TVL with a bonding curve concentrating liquidity at 1:1, more effective for pegged assets than Uniswap. Features grew to include BTC wrappers, stETH pairs, and crvUSD (a CDP stablecoin with reversible liquidations & a peg-keepe...
Sci-fi titan Neal Stephenson, whose Snow Crash coined the term 'metaverse' and Cryptonomicon, which foreshadowed crypto in 1999, joins Friederike to discuss his "hard sci-fi" method: building immersive, consistent worlds, not prophecy. He's now co-founder of Lamina1, aiming to restore Web1's ethos and give creators IP sovereignty with direct micropayments, breaking free from Web2's "walled gardens...
As blockchain tech gets co-opted by legacy players for efficiency gains, has the revolution lost its edge? Crypto philosopher Paul Dylan-Ennis and Jito's Head of Governance, Dr. Nick Almond, join Friederike to probe this shift from 2017's visionary DAOs to today's Telegram-negotiated votes and whale capture.
Rooted in philosophy and complex systems, they unpack mind-hacking risks via data micro-targeting, the polycentri...
Brave has spent a decade building a privacy-first browser that empowers users with tools like ad-blocking and fingerprinting protection, now serving 100 million monthly active users.
Security engineer Kyle Den Hartog joins Friederike to unpack the centralization traps in digital identity from email's spam-driven dominance to one-size-fits-all DeFi lending rates and how Brave counters them with BAT's user-rewarding ad model, zero-kn...
In this episode, Sebastien is joined by Jelena Djuric, co-founder of Noble, a generic asset issuance chain built for the Cosmos ecosystem. Jelena shares her journey into crypto, which began with an interest in political science, leading her to discover Bitcoin's potential. She describes the origins of Noble, created to solve a critical need within Cosmos: a native, fungible source of liquidity like USDC.
Before Noble, assets were of...
In this episode, Sebastien Couture is joined by Benjamin, the founder of CAP, a stablecoin protocol designed to provide insured yield. The protocol features two main products: CUSD, a digital dollar, and stCUSD, its staked, yield-bearing version. Yield is generated through an "allocation engine" where third-party operators borrow from the protocol's reserve to execute yield strategies. To ensure user deposits, these o...
TradFi FX markets are slow, expensive and often lack liquidity for direct swaps between different world currencies, having to route through USD pairs. While crypto could technically solve pairing through AMM pools, those needed to be arbitraged in order to reflect TradFi rates. With 15 fully-backed stablecoins, Mento is building the largest FX infrastructure, bringing world currencies onchain through its robust multi-currency stabl...
Without a doubt, the introduction of stablecoins has vastly increased overall crypto liquidity, adoption and real-world use cases as they offered a safe haven against the industry’s volatility, especially during bearmarkets. However, despite being extremely efficient, the main stablecoin actors (i.e. Circle & Tether) are centralised entities. Many attempts have been made to create a reliable decentralised stablecoin, but regula...
Euler is a DeFi lending protocol built around the idea of permissionless modularity, enabling users to lend and borrow almost any crypto asset with flexible, permissionless pools, tailored to individual risk profiles. Moreover, Euler Vault Kit (EVK) and Ethereum Vault Connector (EVC) enable the creation of custom lending vaults which, in turn, can be used as collateral for other vaults. Earlier this year Euler also announced EulerS...
Blockchains operate as a public ledger, ‘disclosing’ the entire transaction history and associated data to everyone. While verifiability and traceability are key traits, as blockchains gain global adoption, those very features hinder the process. Self custody, on-chain identities, corporate strategies, transaction history, private deals, all represent highly sensitive information that call for provable confidentiality. Fully homomo...
Built primarily for institutional-grade clients, Pareto delivers customizable on-chain credit markets designed to expand DeFi liquidity and TradFi tokenization through structured yield strategies tailored to diverse risk profiles. Pareto allows its users to construct individualized credit lines in specific risk-ajusted tranches, with custom: interest rates, lockup periods, withdrawal cycles, reserve ratios, etc. In addition, Paret...
In an age when AI models are becoming exponentially more sophisticated and powerful, how does one ensure that proper results are being generated and that the AI model functions in desired parameters? This pressing concern of AI alignment could be solved through cryptographic verification, using zero knowledge proofs. ZKPs not only allow for verifying computation at scale, but they also confer data privacy. Lagrange’s DeepProve zkML...
Inspired by Urbit’s minimal assembly language, Nockchain fuses Urbit’s vision of sovereign computing with a novel proof-of-useful-work consensus mechanism, creating a blockchain where every computation fuels progress and scaling. The crypto-economics behind Nockchain’s zkVM incentivise competition between zero knowledge provers, ultimately bootstrapping ZKPs as a new computational commodity.
Topics covered in this episode:
- Logan’...
Universal Market Access (UMA) was founded by 2 ex Goldman Sachs traders that wanted to make global markets universally accessible through financial smart contracts that used synthetic assets on Ethereum. However, this was taking place long before the massive boom of DeFi summer of 2020. As a result, UMA shifted to building an optimistic oracle to power prediction markets as a decentralised ‘truth machine’, thus expanding oracle use...
Founded in 2018, Dragonfly has quickly become one of the most prestigious crypto VCs. Dragonfly was one of the first to adopt a global approach to backing founders and disruptive tech, all while building a strong brand that allowed them to secure top-tier deals. Join us for a fascinating discussion with Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly, to learn the secrets behind running a top-tier crypto VC and what made Dragonfly su...
‘Attention Is All You Need’, co-wrote by Illia Polosukhin in 2017, laid the foundation for arguably one of the most consequential tech breakthroughs in our recent history. 1 year later, Illia founded Near AI, which later became Near Protocol. They were visionaries ahead of their time and, although AI took several more years before becoming a viable product, the experience of scaling databases would later prove valuable and applicab...
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