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 stablecoin platform. In order to provide traders with accurate real-word FX rates, Mento employs FPMM (fixed-price market makers) which gather offchain data from multiple oracles. Instant settlement, cross-border, at a fraction of a cost of conventional remittance providers, while also avoiding traditional banking limitations.

Backed by strong on- & off-ramp integrations, Mento also caters towards day-to-day use cases, empowering locals and businesses to diversify their FX exposure without the hurdles of TradFi. Mento enables smooth cross-currency transactions without traditional banking limitations, unlocking DeFi yield for a wide variety of currencies.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Markus’ background, from TradFi to DeFi
• Unbanking the banked
• Starting a stablecoin protocol on Celo
• The role of stablecoins
• FX markets & Mento’s design
• FPMM vs. AMM
• Mento’s target audience
• Centralised vs. decentralised stablecoins
• Mento governance
• M0’s approach
• Integrating with banking systems

Episode links:

• ⁠Markus Franke on X
• Mento on X
• Celo on X

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - ⁠⁠gnosis.io⁠⁠

This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.

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 regulations and the resounding collapse of Terra’s UST have only pushed towards more established, yet centralised, variants.

f(x) is a new generation CDP (collateralised debt position) protocol that offers on-chain perpetual trading for BTC & ETH with near-0 funding rates and a novel liquidation mechanism which protects users against hard liquidations. The leverage component is powered by emitting fxUSD, the protocol’s decentralised stablecoin, which boasts robust peg-keeping mechanisms, the main one being fxSAVE’s stability pool. The fxSAVE strategy bestows nearly 10% APY to the yield-bearing fxUSD-USDC pair.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Cyrille’s background
• AladdinDAO
• Decentralised stablecoins
• f(x) perps and sharing liquidation risks
• The efficiency of progressive liquidations
• Removing funding rates
• fxSAVE’s stability pool yields
• fxUSD’s organic adoption
• The importance of decentralised stablecoins
• Winning in the perp arena
• Opportunities in the stablecoin adoption race

Episode links:

• Cyrille Brière on X
• f(x) Protocol on X
• AladdinDAO on X

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - ⁠gnosis.io⁠

This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture.

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 EulerSwap, a new DEX with a built-in AMM powered by Euler’s lending infrastructure and integrated with Uniswap v4’s hook architecture. EulerSwap integrates directly with Euler’s lending vaults, allowing assets to be used across multiple pools. This turns the lending protocol into a shared liquidity layer, improving capital efficiency across the ecosystem via swaps, lending yield or collateral for borrowing other assets.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Michael’s background
• The history & vision behind Euler
• The Euler hack
• Euler V2
• Euler vs. other lending protocols
• Diversifying offerings
• Variable vs. fixed rates
• How Pendle works
• Euler’s future
• RWAs
• Privacy in DeFi
• Euler roadmap
• The impact of AI in DeFi

Episode links:

• ⁠⁠Michael Bentley on X⁠⁠
• Euler on X⁠⁠

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - ⁠gnosis.io⁠
• Chorus One: one of the largest node operators worldwide, trusted by 175,000+ accounts across more than 60 networks, Chorus One combines institutional-grade security with the highest yields at - ⁠chorus.one⁠

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.

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 homomorphic encryption has long been considered the ‘holy grail’ of cryptography as it enables computation to be performed on encrypted data without the need of prior decryption. This basically translates to true end-to-end encryption, both on-chain and off-chain. As cryptographic research advances, so does the scalability and applicability of FHE. As a result of more than 5 years of work, Zama has now released Zama Protocol, which enables confidential smart contracts on top of any L1 or L2 using FHE, without any additional execution burden. By encrypting all ciphertexts with the same public key, FHE ensures composability and seamless integration across different blockchains and applications, making it a true cross-chain confidentiality layer. Through parallel execution, Zama Protocol already surpasses Ethereum’s throughput, yet future roadmap includes open-source development of FPGA & ASIC in order to scale it even further, to accommodate faster, non-EVM chains.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Zama’s progress in FHE
• Zama's confidential blockchain Protocol
• Security guarantees of MPC coprocessors
• Maintaining a healthy operator set
• Slashing and governance
• Zama’s throughput
• Open-sourcing FPGA & ASIC development
• The Zama token & its implications
• Zama’s public testnet
• Private voting
• Zama funding
• Regulations
• Expanding use cases beyond blockchains
• Future goals and expectations

Episode links:

• Rand Hindi on X
• Zama on X

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
• Chorus One: one of the largest node operators worldwide, trusted by 175,000+ accounts across more than 60 networks, Chorus One combines institutional-grade security with the highest yields at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.

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, Pareto’s USP is an yield-bearing synthetic stablecoin, fully backed by major stablecoins, that can be deployed into a diversified portfolio of liquid, short- and long-term credit, thus increasing capital efficiency.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Matteo’s background
• Idle Finance yield optimization
• Pivoting to Pareto
• Institutional borrowers in early DeFi
• Competitive advantage of Pareto
• Outsourcing underwriting
• Managing defaults
• Customized lending
• KYC requirements
• Timeline terms ‘marketplace’
• USP, Pareto’s synthetic yield-bearing dollar
• Legal framework & credit allocators
• USP yield, liquidity & integrations
• ‘Opaque’ credit vs. DeFi
• Pareto smart contracts and redeems
• Success in on-chain credit markets

Episode links:

• Matteo Pandolfi on X
• Pareto
• Pareto on X
• Idle Finance on X

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
• Chorus One: one of the largest node operators worldwide, trusted by 175,000+ accounts across more than 60 networks, Chorus One combines institutional-grade security with the highest yields at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.

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 is the fastest in existence, making it easy to prove that AI inferences are correct, scaling verifiable computation as the demand for AI grows.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Ismael’s background and founding Lagrange
• AI x crypto convergence
• ZKML use cases
• AI inference verifiability
• AI safety regulations
• Revenue accruing tokens
• Pitching Lagrange to enterprise clients
• Assembling a dedicated team
• Cryptography research

Episode links:

• Ismael Hishon-Rezaizadeh on X
• Lagrange on X

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
• Chorus One: one of the largest node operators worldwide, trusted by 175,000+ accounts across more than 60 networks, Chorus One combines institutional-grade security with the highest yields at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture.

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’s background
• Urbit’s values
• Nock, Urbit's minimal assembly language
• Use cases for zk proofs
• Nockchain’s zkVM efficiency
• Useful proof-of-work
• Launching Nockchain
• Future roadmap for Nockchain
• Building apps on Nockchain
• Store of value vs. revenue generation
• The impact of quantum computing

Episode links:

• Logan Allen on X
• Zorp on X
• Nockchain on X
• Urbit on X

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
• Chorus One: one of the largest node operators worldwide, trusted by 175,000+ accounts across more than 60 networks, Chorus One combines institutional-grade security with the highest yields at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain.

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 cases. Through game theoretic models, UMA managed to properly incentivise its token holders to act as voters, rewarding them for good predictions & disputes, and vice versa. Later on, Hart Lambur also co-founded Across, an intent-based optimistic bridge that set out to create a seamless UX for unifying EVM chains. Through their solver network, Across managed to achieve fast (as low as 2 seconds) and cheap bridging, abstracting away crosschain complexities, without any security tradeoffs.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Hart’s background
• Universal Market Access, from synthetic assets to oracles
• Building Across
• UMA’s optimistic oracle
• Incentivizing voters & resolving disputes
• Dealing with invalid outcomes
• Optimistic security assumptions
• UMA x Across dual token interactions
• Across’ intent-based bridge
• Pricing mechanism & solver competition
• ZK settlement
• Bridging fragmentation
• Abstracting & unifying cross-chain bridging
• Bridging between rollups
• UMA & Across governance systems

Episode links:

• Hart Lambur on X
• Across Protocol on X
• UMA Protocol on X

Sponsors:

• Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.io
• Chorus One: one of the largest node operators worldwide, trusted by 175,000+ accounts across more than 60 networks, Chorus One combines institutional-grade security with the highest yields at - chorus.one

This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.