Episodes

Paul Smyth and I look at Sam Bankman-Fried’s 25-year sentence before jumping to the brighter side of things with BlackRock’s new tokenized money market fund.  We then time travel back to 2017 with Copper’s sushi party (or so we thought), and close things out by questioning the correlation between fintech funding and the crypto bull run.

Joaquim Matinero Tor joins the show this week as guest co-host as we look at the likely paths to CBDC adoption (Central Bank Digital Currencies) in countries around the world making progress with these digital versions of fiat currencies.

Laura Walsh joins the show again this week as guest co-host as we explore the potential link between digital identity and decentralized social media through the lens of the Farcaster protocol, its challenges, user growth, and the future potential of a decentralized online ecosystem.

Brian Zwerner is the President and Founder of W3 Studio, and a VC and Founder of Beyond the Game Network.  As the President and Founder of W3 Studio, a 501c3 non-profit venture studio, Brian and his team help diverse founders in Atlanta build startups in web3. W3 Studio partners with corporations and provides grants to startups to fund the launch of their first products.

We've remastered and packaged up two of our most popular episodes from 2023 that were originally going to be one episode looking at the venture capital mantra of ‘investing in lines and not dots’ with VC investing insights from Patrick Pinschmidt from Middlegame Ventures and my lessons learned from my first 1,000 deals.

Mai Santamaria joins me once again as guest co-host as we riff on the intersection of digital identity, digital wallets, blockchain, CBDCs, and how the political regime under which an individual lives influences your senses of trust and risk. We also blow to bits my expectation that the new EU digital identity wallet will have anything to do with blockchain, contrary to what we’re seeing with digital identity frameworks in Latin America.

Blockchain ecosystem advisor and researcher Simon Brown from Consensys joins me as guest co-host this week. Consensys is a leading blockchain and web3 software company whose products like MetaMask and Infura are well known to the blockchain and crypto community. Simon and I riffed on Spot Crypto ETFs, the Besu Outage and the creation of the PBS Foundation in the context of the over-centralization of crypto.

Pete gives a quick update on the Spot Bitcoin ETF approval followed by a roundup of Messari's Crypto Theses 2024 with guest co-host Alejandro Gutierrez.