Blockwatch
By Nathan Windsor
Our podcast focuses on how entrepreneurs are deploying the tech to create products that are expanding the decentralization landscape.
BlockwatchAug 22, 2021
Polywrap: web3 interoperability from any programming language.
Polywrap is a developer tool that enables easy integration of Web3 protocols into any application. It makes it possible for applications on any platform, written in any language, to read and write data to Web3 protocols.
Anything you can build with JavaScript today, the idea is that you can build this with a Polywrapper and it's going to have all the benefits of what Polywrappers can do, So the possibilities are really limitless.
Join their Discord to learn more.
Bender Labs: The First Decentralized Bank Bringing DeFi to Tezos
Hugo Renaudin is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Bender Labs, the first decentralized bank: a decentralized organization leveraging smart contracts and DeFi to offer decentralized financial services.
Prior to this, Hugo co-founded and was the CEO of LGO a fair and transparent digital asset exchange designed for institutional investors and OTC desk sold to Voyager Digital 7 months ago.
Hugo also worked in various roles within the financial industry. This included positions in FX trading, Equity Derivatives and fund management. His first venture into cryptocurrency began at BitSpread, where he was a Portfolio Advisor for the $100M+ AUM cryptocurrency hedge fund. Hugo holds a Master of Science degree from Columbia University and a Master of Science degree from Ecole Polytechnique in France. An expert on finance, cryptocurrencies and blockchain, Hugo has been seen on different shows from BFM TV to Nasdaq.
Copper: Institutional Grade Custody
Jake Rogers is the Chief Information Security Officer at Copper.
Copper Safeguards trade infrastructure for pioneering institutions. They have over 200 assets that can be safely custodied using MPC sharding technology.
Nodle: The IoT Chain of Polkadot
Eliott Teissonniere is a renowned Blockchain expert leading the conception of Nodle’s decentralized architecture since 2018. He became the CTO of BITNATION in 2017 and lead the development of smart contract based multiple governance tools which was rewarded by the NetExplo prize from UNESCO the same year. After leaving the company in September 2017 he developed the world’s first marriage smart contract on Ethereum, allowing people to get married on the blockchain for the first time. He then established itself as an independent contractor and worked on multiple projects including the creation of a Universal Basic Income platform for cities in the Middle West and a decentralized reputation platform. He was featured in various medias for his work on decentralized governance and blockchains such as Decrypt, CoinTelegraph and CoinDesk; and spoke at various high profile events such as the Paris Blockchain Week, the Stanford Blockchain Conference and presented in front of the European commission with past European deputies on the subject of Covid-19 tracing via the Blockchain. He is a mentor at the Berkeley Blockchain Accelerator and advises other startups in the Blockchain ecosystem.
Find him on Twitter: @EliottTeiss
"With the Nodle Cash app, we directly pay the users for the data that they are sharing, like a profit-sharing system. The other way we distribute the Nodle tools is that we work with app developers to integrate the Nodle tooling inside the application so that they can pay their users."
"Another way to fund the web, instead of being funded by apps, you can simply fund it by collecting the data that is specifically around you and the model behind Nodle is that ultimately all the data that is around you and your phone on devices that are willingly broadcasting it in a public way, may ultimately be more valuable and more usable than making profiles on people"
"We actually started modestly on Stellar and we pushed the app on the HTC Exodus phone, and people starting using it, because it was there on your phone, and why not? It was free to use and maybe one day the Nodle cash was going to be worth something, and they have nothing to lose."
These are the stellar block explorer links we discuss in the podcast.
NGrave: The Coldest Wallet
NGRAVE'S mission is to eradicate the loss and the malicious hacking of your crypto.
He was a victim of the Mt. Gox hack back in 2014 and the DAO hack in 2016. So this made him very conscious about the security issues in blockchain's brave new world, and helped the team create a safe and trustable product.
Links discussed in the show:
Chainlink VRF link
Joel Telpner: the ABCs of CBDCs and Stablecoins
Joel is the chair of Sullivan's Fintech and Blockchain Practice. He is a highly-regarded trailblazer in the Fintech, blockchain, and cryptocurrency space. Joel's clients’ size and nature vary from governments, top cryptocurrencies, and large enterprises to smaller startups, who describe him as a “very sharp and very experienced partner” who is “super pragmatic” and can “sort through the chaff and get to the nub of things impressively quickly.”
His representative client work includes advising the Marshall Islands in creating digital sovereign currencies; helping to launch ndau, a buoyant stablecoin virtual currency; structuring for Gita Holdings/GreatX a structured, principal-protected tokenized investment product allowing investors to obtain upside exposure to hotel room blocks in various hotel properties; as well as providing regulatory advice to prominent blockchain projects including Aeternity, IOTA, NEM, and Celsius.
Being recognized worldwide as an authority on blockchain and digital asset issues, Joel currently sits on several of the industry’s leading research groups and has spoken extensively worldwide. He works on global regulatory policy initiatives for the Chamber of Digital Commerce, the Blockchain Research Institute, the Global Blockchain Business Council, Wharton Reg@Tech, and the Wall Street Blockchain Alliance’s Legal Working Group. He co-founded the Stablecoin Foundation, a global trade association for stablecoins in October 2018.
Vinay Gupta: How Mattereum Will Save the World
Vinay Gupta, CEO of Mattereum, discusses how Mattereum tokenizes real world assets and can help solve slavery and climate change.
Mattereum has the tools to make physical goods flow around the world as easily as information using Ethereum blockchain smart contracts.
They help people to sell, organize, and communicate about their property with confidence. Strong product knowledge ensures everyone derives maximum value from objects they buy, sell, and own.
More importantly, Mattereum can track carbon assets, and the conditions under which products are produced. This has a lot of implications for controlling the effects of climate change because it can tie the price of good to the actual costs
Secure and Collective Decision Making with Alex Bulkin
Today we are joined by Alex Bulkin.
Aleksandr Bulkin spent the period between August 2016 until November 2019 at CoinFund, NY, researching and helping deploy significant capital into blockchain-based and peer-to-peer infrastructure and related assets. During this time he has had multiple speaker engagements at high profile events, such as 2017 Token Summit, and has been invited internationally to mentor organizations and entrepreneurs on the topic of monetary incentives, digital asset investing, and cryptoeconomics.
Previously, he spent 14 years as an engineer at Goldman & Sachs in the area of high-performance financial technology, with special interest in reducing human error and other holistic approaches to systems reliability.
Alex can be reached on twitter at: https://twitter.com/MrSumfing
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Dr. Alex Cahana: Blockchain and The Failure of Healthcare in the US.
Today we are joined by Dr. Alex Cahana.
He is the Chief Medical Officer and EMEA lead for Consensys Health (Europe Middle East and Africa) where he is working on solving the world's health crises with better data sharing; federated learning. He is a blockchain expert in Healthcare for the UN to promote cooperation between private enterprises and governments.
Dr. Cahana has requested that we share his email with our listeners. He can be reached at alex.cahana@consensyshealth.com
He’s a “crypto health sherpa”, which basically means that he is hired to take inexperienced people up the Everest of understanding the inner workings of blockchain as it relates to healthcare, bringing along the oxygen tanks and cleans up after people realize they’re building open source software in a capitalist business model.
Dr. Cahana's background:
- Medical Attache & Founding Member at the Internet Foundation
- Member of Top Tier Impact, a group that solve big problems that require expertise in impact & sustainability for the betterment of our planet.
- Strategic advisor for Global Blockchain Ventures
- Advisor at Crypto Oracle
- Theme Develop for ARK Invest
- Subject Matter Expert for Defense & Veterans Center for Integrative Pain Management
- At University of Washington he was the Endowed Professor and Chief of Pain Medicine for 5 years, which essentially meant he overhauled their entire pain management department
- And he was the head of Interventional Pain Program at the University of Geneva.
- He also served in the Israeli Defense Force for many years.
This is to say that Dr. Cahana has an extensive understanding of the treatment and management of pain, which is why he’s the most sought after advisor for healthcare companies and governments that want to use blockchain technology.
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Here's an in-depth look at how staking in Tezos works:
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