Wyre Talks

Imagine having the capacity to build a website that only you can put up or take down. A website that doesn’t require you to answer to any government or powerful company. A truly censorship-resistant website created on a decentralized registry.

Brad Kam is the Cofounder and Head of Business Development at Unstoppable Domains, a blockchain startup that makes crypto payments simple and facilitates the creation of such censorsh...

Scalability. Interoperability. Liquidity. Any number of projects in the crypto space are working to tackle these problems. But just one is solving for all three at the same time and leveraging cashflow incentives to encourage participation in the network.

Varun Vruddhula is the Founder of Hashflow Network and Lawson Baker serves as an Advisor and Acting Head of Operations for the team. On this episode of Wyre Talks, Varun a...

Here at Wyre, we’re in a unique market position, serving as a bridge from the traditional payments ecosystem to the Wild West that is cryptocurrency. And we spend a lot of time on the podcast getting granular about innovative crypto projects and blockchain technology, but we have yet to focus our attention exclusively on the payments space. Until today, that is!

On this episode of Wyre Talks, we’re discussing key trends in ...

It’s no surprise that Joey Krug is a fan of taking calculated risks. After all, he was betting on horse races (and winning) in middle school and eventually created a mechanism for making bets on the blockchain. As an early crypto developer, Joey had the opportunity to meet a lot of promising entrepreneurs. And ultimately, he put together a syndicate to invest in the projects with the most potential.

Joey is the creator of A...

GNOSIS is a pioneer in the Ethereum ecosystem, creating the first implementation of both the multisig and smart contract wallets. Their pivotal technology served as the backbone for many ICOs, and the GNOSIS team was the first to leverage the Dutch auction for trading. So, how did the team at GNOSIS become trailblazers in the crypto space? And how are they working to demonstrate the value of fully decentralized prediction ...

If you ask Lasse Clausen, tokenized networks are better than free. And that’s why he has created a crypto investment fund around a token maximalist philosophy. A fund that capitalizes on permissionless innovation and declining trust in companies and governments. The 1kx thesis is flexible enough to adapt to the fast-moving blockchain space yet focused enough that it affords the team conviction—even when tokens are out of f...

The most powerful financial tools available live on the blockchain. The problem is, only crypto aficionados currently have access to these decentralized financial protocols like Kyber, Uniswap, Maker, and Compound. So, how can we serve the investing, trading and borrowing needs of non-crypto users, abstracting the complexities of the blockchain to bring DeFi to the world?

Itamar Lesuisse and Julien Niset are the cofounders...

It goes without saying that DeFi is better with Bitcoin as collateral. And there is an appetite among BTC holders for ways to actively apply our money. But as of yet, there is no way to bring Bitcoin onto Ethereum that is censorship-resistant and adheres to the #1 principle of BTC: No printing money. Until now. The newly formed Cross-Chain Group is working on a project that facilitates interoperability known as tBTC Networ...

Crypto is a different animal. Investors who play in the blockchain space are putting their money on a science experiment rather than a company with a business plan. And the pace and complexity of the ecosystem make it impossible to have a depth of knowledge in any one area. So, the best crypto venture investors can do is secure a broad understanding of the space and adapt their beliefs to the world as it changes.

Haseeb Qu...

The creators of Perlin still hold the long-term vision of developing a revenue-generating distributed ledger system that closes the wealth gap. But until smartphones are powerful enough and broadband speeds are fast enough, the team has expanded its scope to include Wavelet, a DAG ledger that powers WebAssembly smart contracts.

Kenta Iwasaki and Dorjee Sun are the cofounders of Perlin, a crypto project powering the future ...

The ZRX token was created to facilitate governance for 0x as a public piece of infrastructure. It gave the community voting rights and was baked into the settlement layer as a way to collect fees. The idea was to get the token into the hands of the platform’s users. But soon after launch, the team realized their hypothesis was wrong, and they have spent the last 18 months developing a new token economics model that rewards...

Today, we're looking back at the first six months of 2019 to review the most important developments in crypto. We start with the launch of LIBRA, discussing its ambition to own the financial infrastructure in the developing world. We introduce the evolving narrative around Bitcoin and explore what's behind BTC price action, including the trade war with China and the current monetary policy.

Louis offers insight into which ...

How do you develop a venture fund that invests in future tech like jetpacks and exoskeletons? According to Adam Draper, you start by branding yourself as the VC interested in ‘anything that gets me closer to an Ironman suit.’ This attracts the demented builders and deal flow of wild things you need to realize your sci-fi vision of a world without borders. To date, Adam’s team has invested in more than 250 startups, 110 of ...

Seth Rubin is the cofounder and CEO of MARKET Protocol, a framework for creating synthetic assets represented as tokens that allows users to gain exposure to a variety of assets without leaving the Ethereum network. Today, he joins us to discuss the launch of the MARKET Protocol Exchange (MPX) and minting platform, explaining the role of the MKT token in onboarding and educating new users. Seth shares the benefit to puttin...

Michael Feng was looking for a problem to solve, so he spent September of 2018 talking to everyone he could in the crypto space. The notion of liquidity kept coming up, and without knowing exactly what the solution might be, he and his team set out to answer the question: How do you create the liquidity necessary to attract traders to cryptocurrency markets?

Michael weighs in on the technical and regulatory challenges asso...

John Burnett is the Cofounder and Head of Business Development and Strategy at Omniex, an institutional operating platform for investment managers and active traders focused on crypto assets. Today, he joins us to explain how Omniex is priming the crypto market for institutional entry, describing the increasing interest in the tokenization of assets among institutional players and the impact their entry will have on the cr...

Today, we’re joined by the cofounders of UMA, COO Allison Lu and CEO Hart Lambur. Allison and Hart explain how UMA facilitates bilateral derivatives by allowing the short side to be levered and collateralizing the long side at 100%, and they describe how the tokenized derivative smart contract serves as the protocol’s core technology. They go on to cover the hub-and-spoke design of the UMA market structure, the team’s deci...

Crypto wallets come in a variety of shapes and sizes. What the team stands for has an influence on who they serve, what services they offer, and how they address security. The architecture of the wallet itself is, in fact, shaped by each project’s core values. Curious how the co-founders of three very distinct wallets make decisions based on their respective mission statements?

We also weigh in on security, covering the pr...

Hayden Adams is the founder of Uniswap, the decentralized exchange that affords users a simple smart contract interface for trading ERC-20 tokens, a formalized model for pooling liquidity reserves, and an open-source front-end for traders and liquidity providers. Today, Hayden joins us to offer insight around the design tradeoffs he considered in building Uniswap, the pros, and cons of the constant product model, and the a...