The Ethereal Podcast Ethereal Summit

In Episode 10 of the Ethereal Podcast, DeFi Dad interviews the CoFounders of Mintbase, Nate Geier and Carolin Wend.

Mintbase is an NFT factory for the new virtual economy. One can mint non-fungible tokens (NFTs) using Mintbase, which represent scarce digital goods like artwork. Artists using Mintbase, especially in virtual NFT worlds like Cryptovoxels, can issue traceable, limited edition digital art, as well as other items such as tickets for virtual events. While DeFi has been at the forefront of attention in Ethereum, few understand how much growth NFTs are seeing on Ethereum. For example, SuperRare, a leading digital art marketplace, started in 2020 with $344,000 in platform sales volume which has quadrupled to over $1.6m according to Messari Crypto.

In this episode, we discuss how Mintbase empowers creators in new digital and virtual worlds, including arts, gaming, photography, and virtual event tickets, especially since the start of the quarantine.

To learn more about Mintbase visit mintbase.io. You can follow @mintbase on Twitter for updates.

Ask questions in the Mintbase Discord channel: https://discord.com/invite/89cSHH7

Follow Nate Geier, CEO and CoFounder on Twitter at @NateGeier as well as CoFounder and Head of Business Development, Carolin Wend at @CarolinWend.

In Episode 9 of the Ethereal Podcast, DeFi Dad interviews the CoFounder of Liquality, Simon Lapscher.

The Liquality team built a protocol for enabling trustless cross-chain swaps between Bitcoin and Ethereum. You can use Liquality's swap at https://liquality.io/swap/ to trade BTC for ETH, DAI, USDC or go the other direction to trade back to BTC. Liquality also recently released Liquality Wallet which includes this swap feature, but as in a browser extension wallet, similar to MetaMask but capable of holding BTC as well as your Ethereum assets.

In this episode, we kick off with why life experiences fueled cofounders from Venezuela, Iran, and South Africa to come together and focus on building trustless, "disintermediated" p2p finance tools with Bitcoin and Ethereum to be impenetrable to corrupt, authoritarian governments. Simon helps paint a clearer picture of why DeFi and all future applications built on Ethereum need to have the right foundation to be censorship resistant, so no one can ever shut it down. He also discusses how Bitcoin and Ethereum have been successful to date in scaling such decentralized blockchains.

We also dive into what it's been like to work across the top 2 crypto protocols the last few years, how they differ, and how Liquality is working harder than ever to capitalize on this 2020 momentum to revolutionize the world with interoperable p2p finance.

To learn more about Liquality, visit liquality.io and their swap for BTC ETH/USDC/DAI at liquality.io/swap. You can follow @liquality_io on Twitter for updates.

Ask questions in the Liquality Telegram channel at https://t.me/liquality.

Follow Simon Lapscher on Twitter at @simonlapscher.

*Watch a tutorial of the Liquality Swap on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8zcvEy2Ccw&feature=youtu.be
*Read Liquality Blog: https://liquality.io/blog/
*See Simon's CoFounder Alex G on a panel at The Ethereal Virtual Summit 2020: https://youtu.be/0AEERkemYn8
*Check out DeFi Dad's quick walkthrough of the Liquality Wallet: https://youtu.be/GytOAwQTGsE

In Episode 8 of the Ethereal Podcast, DeFi Dad interviews Head of Strategy and Business Operations at dYdX, Zhuoxun Yin.

The dYdX team has been a leader in building the most dominant decentralized margin trading platform on Ethereum. In May 2020, they launched the first decentralized perpetual swap with 10X leverage for BTC-USDC on Ethereum. We discuss with Zhuoxun how dYdX has made it their mission to build more performant products to attract traders to DEXs and how they made the decision to launch, what is now the top decentralized perpetual market for BTC on Ethereum. We dig into the history of of crypto perpetual markets and what it will take to convince traders on the world's largest centralized perpetual markets like Bitmex to switch to a decentralized, self-custody trading experience with dYdX.

To learn more about dYdX and their spot, margin, and perpetuals trading markets, visit dydx.exchange and follow the @dydxprotocol on Twitter.

Ask questions in the dYdX Telegram channel at https://t.me/dydxofficial.

Follow Zhuoxun Yin on Twitter at @ZhuoxunYin.

*Read The Integral blog by the dYdX team Comparing Perpetual Markets: https://integral.dydx.exchange/comparing-perpetual-markets/
*Read The Integral blog by the dYdX team Understanding Perpetual Marketing Funding: https://integral.dydx.exchange/understanding-perpetual-market-funding/
*Watch dYdX's CEO Antonio Juliano speak on a DeFi panel at Ethereal Virtual Summit 2020 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A669uiDiCE8
*Check out DeFi Dad's review using the dYdX trading platform: https://twitter.com/DeFi_Dad/status/1262804398184566792?s=20

In Episode 7 of the Ethereal Podcast, DeFi Dad interviews Ren Protocol CoFounder and CTO, Loong Wang.

The RenVM aims to provide access to inter-blockchain liquidity for all decentralized applications. It has gained lots of attention from the Ethereum DeFi community for enabling a trustless swap of BTC to renBTC, which is an ERC20 token you can then utilize in Ethereum applications like Uniswap, 1inch.exchange, and Curve Finance, along with the promise of future direct deposits of BTC into lending, borrowing, and trading apps like Compound, Maker, and TokenSets. As of May 28, 2020, there is just under $50M in BTC tokens on Ethereum so unlocking this frictionless migration of BTC value onto Ethereum is a big deal and should become a norm in the coming year, leading to increased liquidity in DeFi and total value deposited into Ethereum smart contracts.

This podcast was recorded a week before the RenBridge went live on Ethereum Mainnet so there is some brief discussion about the anticipation of the Ren release, which is now available for anyone to use on Ethereum at bridge.renproject.io.

To learn more about the RenVM, visit renproject.io and follow the @renprotocol on Twitter.
Ask questions in the Ren Telegram channel at https://t.me/renproject.
Follow Loong Wang on Twitter at @bzlwang.

Watch Loong's talk from the Ethereal Virtual Summit 2020 here: https://youtu.be/gPXBiDKR2IM
Watch DeFi Dad's video tutorial swapping BTC to mint renBTC here: https://youtu.be/kO0672RJL-Q
Watch a more detailed DeFi Dad tutorial on how to swap BTC to renBTC to WBTC to open a Maker loan here: https://youtu.be/XvWRDlcTipg

In Episode 6 of the Ethereal Podcast, DeFi Dad interviews CoFounder of Opyn, Alexis Gauba.

Alexis and her team launched the first DeFi platform on Ethereum for buying and selling put options for DeFi assets like DAI lent on Compound as well as the first on-chain put options for ETH. It's been a huge leap forward for the Ethereum and DeFi community to be able to essentially use these on-chain put options as insurance against technical (smart contract bugs) and financial risks while also hedging against the volatility of ETH. At the time of our interview, they were only a month post-launch from ETH Denver, where coincidentally bZx suffered from a flash loan attack, helping further bring to light the need for Opyn to protect DeFi assets deposited in Ethereum smart contracts.

Alexis and her two CoFounders all met at UC Berkeley as members of Blockchain at Berkeley, where they came up with the idea for Opyn. During the interview, she explains how anyone, regardless of having zero knowledge about options, can use this popular instrument in legacy finance, cleverly rebranded by Opyn as "protection" to prevent losses in case of smart contract failure or some unforeseen financial risk causing a DeFi apps like Compound to ever fail in the future. They also discuss an even bigger addressable market in offering trustless put options on ETH to protect against a volatile drawdown in the price, especially after we had all recently lived through a near 50% drawdown across the entire crypto market on Black Thursday, March 12, 2020.

Alexis is the CoFounder of she256, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing diversity and breaking down barriers to entry in the blockchain space, with nearly 1000 global members. She talked with DeFi Dad about being a female founder in the crypto space and how she's trying to encourage more women and more diversity to work in Ethereum and crypto in general.

You can see Alexis speak at the Ethereal Virtual Summit on May 7-8th, 2020 by registering for free at etherealsummit.com/register.

To learn more about Opyn, visit opyn.co and follow the @opyn_ team on Twitter.
Ask questions in the Opyn Discord at discord.gg/2NFdXaE.
Follow Alexis on Twitter at @AlexisGauba.