Garrett Weaver, the co-founder and CEO of Juke joins the show.

In this episode we discuss:

• Garrett’s career as an entertainment industry executive and the path that led him to starting Juke.
• How Hollywood intellectual property works and how blockchains can open up revenue opportunities for studios.
• The use cases for NFT technology and the innovation on the horizon in the industry.

To learn more about Juke visit www.juke.io

Read about Juke’s launch 

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Nic and Matt return for one of the craziest weeks in crypto history. In this episode: 

• Coin Metrics makes a key on-chain discovery regarding FTX’s insolvency
• Will Castle Island buy the naming rights to the Miami Heat arena?
• What in the hell happened to FTX/Alameda?
• How big is the hole in FTX’ balance sheet
• Was FTX/Alameda insolvent as early as Q2?
• How this is reminiscent of the Bitfinex/Tether transaction?
• What did CZ see that caused him to catalyze the attack on FTX?
• How did FTX pass an audit?
• Who will be affected by the FTX collapse?
• How this will affect the already impaired crypto lenders
• We revisit some of the recent departures from FTX/Alameda
• This explains why FTX was bailing out the lenders in Q2
• Will FTX US be firewalled off here?
• Could this crisis have been forecasted?
• Did Sam perjure himself in front of Congress?
• Gensler’s responsibility in the FTX fiasco
• Su Zhu is trying to do a redemption arc
• Why is Su Zhu surfing?
• Possible regulatory consequences
• What are the midterm consequences for crypto?
• A failure of corporate governance at FTX
• Some venture funds were attesting to the solvency of FTX while withdrawing funds
• FTX is selectively processing withdrawals to Bahamanian entities
• Silver linings from the crisis
• Proof of Reserves is having a moment
• Sam’s crypto agenda in DC is thankfully dead
• SBF was somehow an LP in Sequoia and Paradigm
• Setting the record straight on Tom Brady

Sponsor notes:

• Talos powers institutional access to the entire digital assets ecosystem via a single-point of entry. Connect directly to your preferred prime brokers, lenders, investors, custodians, exchanges, OTC desks and more, or meet them on Talos. Get started at Talos.com
• Subscribe to the Coin Metrics State of the Network newsletter

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Josh Schwartz and Dima Kogan, co-founders of Fordefi, join the show. In this episode we discuss:

• MPC custody: what it is, its academic roots and how MPC works.
• The tradeoffs and considerations that have led to the growth in popularity of MPC custody.
• Josh and Dima’s backgrounds and the path that led them to founding Fordefi.
• The institutional custody landscape and some of the challenges that firms face when engaging with DeFi protcols.
• How Josh and Dima think about the security risks associated with smart contract platforms.
• The types of customers that Fordefi is currently serving.
• Their fundraise announcement and what is next.

To learn more visit fordefi.com

Check out this episode!

• Matt and Nic return for news and deals of the week. In this episode: 
• Why USDC is suffering redemptions but not USDT
• Some new 3AC shenanigans are unearthed
• The SEC and CFTC are investigating 3AC
• Details from the Voyager bankruptcy filing
• Avraham Eisenburg is crypto’s hottest new villain Is the Mango exploit against the law?
• Is there a vigilante group out to get Do Kwon?
• SBF is criticized for his regulatory draft proposal
• The Texas securities regulators are investigating FTX
• FTX shareholders at odds with FTT holders?
• Aptos’ controversial launch
• Have we forgotten how to do a fair launch?
• How Ethereum’s merge put pressure on Bitcoin miners
• Reuters’ Binance investigation
• Unstoppable domains deprecates over 100k .coin domains
• Is Bitcoin finally decorrelating from risk assets?

Sponsor notes:

• Talos powers institutional access to the entire digital assets ecosystem via a single-point of entry. Connect directly to your preferred prime brokers, lenders, investors, custodians, exchanges, OTC desks and more, or meet them on Talos. Get started at Talos.com

• Subscribe to the Coin Metrics State of the Network newsletter 

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Matt and Nic return for another week of deals and news. In this episode: 

• Bitwise is moving into active management
• What’s the deal with Uber on the blockchain?
• The boys review House of the Dragon
• The history of land-based blockchain bets
• Fidelity launches no-fee retail trading for trading BTC and ETH on their platform
• Matt reminisces on Fidelity’s crypto journey
• Google announces blockchain node engine
• Nic’s 2-year pending transaction on Venmo
• SBF continues to wrangle with CT
• Sam’s debate with Erik Voorhees
• Alameda’s questionable balance sheet is leaked
• Can FTX buy its way into respectability despite the existence of Alameda?
• What’s the deal with the MAPS token?
• Is it far for FTX to start offshore and buy way into the regulated system?
• Elon’s schemes for Twitter
• Coinbase and the Blockchain Association are supporting Ripple in their case against the SEC
• The Tether case is reopened at the SDNY
• Tether rips us off with their own bootleg FUD Dice
• What happens to Chinese Tether holders if Tether has to unwind
• If Tether fails, do funds flow back into BTC?
• The mining sector is deeply distressed
• Why the mining bankruptcies may cause concentration in who controls hashrate
• Circle delays their SPAC
• Coin Metrics releases a taxonomy with Goldman and MSCI
• Protos’ weird hatchet job on Nic’s tungsten cube infatuation
• Did we manipulate the market for tungsten?

Sponsor notes:

• Talos powers institutional access to the entire digital assets ecosystem via a single-point of entry. Connect directly to your preferred prime brokers, lenders, investors, custodians, exchanges, OTC desks and more, or meet them on Talos. Get started at Talos.com
• Subscribe to the Coin Metrics State of the Network newsletter

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Jeff Park, an active Portfolio Manager at Bitwise joins the show. In this episode we discuss:

• The state of active crypto asset management.
• How Bitwise approaches the active management opportunity.
• The taxonomy of strategies that Jeff observes in the market.
• Perspectives on MEV and other crypto specific opportunities.
• The institutional LP landscape for active management vs. passive.

To learn more about Bitwise visit bitwiseinvestments.com and see their announcement of new active strategies.

Check out this episode!

CoreWeave‘s Brian Venturo (CTO) and Brannin McBee (CSO) return to On The Brink for a discussion of their journey through the merge and beyond. In this episode: 

• Are they relieved that the merge finally happened?
• Will there be some form of non-Bitcoin PoW in the future?
• Could Ethereum conceivably return to PoW?
• The effect of PoS on ETH’s censor resistance
• What quantity of ETH miners shifted to other PoW chains and what portion went elsewhere?
• What is the best use of capital for former ETH miners now?
• Did the merge really reduce global electricity consumption by 0.2%?
• Brannin’s estimate for precise electricity reduction from the merge
• How feasible is it for former ETH miners to get into GPU clouds?
• How Core Weave built their cloud product
• What it takes to be competitive in the high performance computing sector
• Why the generalized providers of cloud can’t just win when it comes to rendering and ML/AI
• Why the HPC market is exploding right now
• How open source communities behind text and image models contributed to the explosion in use cases
• The importance of Stable Diffusion versus Open AI
• The explosive growth of Stable Diffusion and Stability AI
• How the growth in infrastructure contributed to the emergence of these newer image models
• New directions in AI models like video creation
• Will generative AI be attacked by environmentalists?
• Can cloud data centers handle interruptible loads like Bitcoin miners can?
• How industrial compute will play a role in emerging metaverses
• Use cases Brannin and Brian are excited about
• Why hardware is actually a constraint to the number of metaverse users today

Learn more about CoreWeave here.

Check out this episode!

Matt and Nic are back for another week of deals and news. In this episode: 

• Full time crypto haters
• What’s the deal with the nocoiner think tank?
• Eric Wall and Udi vs Bitcoiners
• Did Bitcoin put all of its eggs in the LN basket?
• Scaling isn’t LN versus big blocks any more
• Is there just one scaling solution for blockchains?
• What are the prospects for ZK Rollups on Bitcoin?
• Spam attacks on BSV and Zcash
• Bitcoin Miners are going bankrupt
• How did the Ethereum merge affect Bitcoin miners
• What’s the deal with Bitcoin’s hashrate spike?
• Are non-economic Bitcoin miners killing the free market for mining?
• What’s the deal with miner lenders?
• Synthetic Bitcoin stablecoins
• Is Twitter fairly priced at the deal price?
• Matt Levine’s 40k word article on crypto
• Is the pivot finally in?

Sponsor notes:

• Talos powers institutional access to the entire digital assets ecosystem via a single-point of entry. Connect directly to your preferred prime brokers, lenders, investors, custodians, exchanges, OTC desks and more, or meet them on Talos. Get started at Talos.com

• Subscribe to the Coin Metrics State of the Network newsletter 

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Mike Cahill, Director of the Pyth Data Association joins the show. In this episode we discuss:

• The origin of Pyth and how the project is addressing the ‘Oracle Problem’.
• How Pyth works and how companies and protocols are using the product today.
• Mike’s views on how equities on chain will evolve, and how Pyth is positioned in this market.
• The recent Mango Markets exploit and the future of on-chain market manipulations in DeFi.
• Pyth’s network of partners and how the network is growing in 2022.

To learn more about Pyth visit Pyth.Network.  

Check out this episode!

For another episode of the mining miniseries, Nic sits down with Blake King, power markets engineer at Galaxy Digital, for his second OTB appearance. In this episode: 

• Blake reacts to the White House OSTP report on crypto mining
• Does mining actually reduce the incentive for utilities to build additional transmission?
• How transmission building decisions get made
• How are ERCOT planners taking the price of Bitcoin into account?
• The merits of proactive transmission construction
• Why the existence of strong property rights makes transmission much harder to build
• Can Bitcoin be understood as the electrification of gold?
• Is there really 17-25 GW worth of Bitcoin miners in the process of connecting to the Texas grid?
• How should we think about interconnection and load queues
• Why would ERCOT exaggerate the planned scale of Bitcoin mining in Texas?
• Do miners using renewables “not count” because they displace other consumers of renewable energy?
• Why Blake expects the $/MWh revenue for Bitcoin to continue to trend down over time
• Are Bitcoin miners forcing grids into grid scarcity events?
• Economic curtailment versus formal demand response
• Are Bitcoiners overestimating the importance of demand response for miners?

Content mentioned in this episode:

• Bitcoin Mining and the Grid, Part I and Part II
• Part I of Blake King on the show: OTB 330
• White House OSTP report on Bitcoin Mining

Intro and outro: Daniel Allan’s Collage #344

Check out this episode!

Matt and Nic are back for another week of deals and news. In this episode: 

• What is XEN and why is it driving up ETH fees?
• Bittrex settles with OFAC
• SEC is investigating Yuga labs
• Mango and Binance Smart Chain are hacked
• The FASB settles on fair value accounting for cryptoassets
• Warren writes a letter to Texas about mining
• Coin Center is suing OFAC

Sponsor notes:

• Talos powers institutional access to the entire digital assets ecosystem via a single-point of entry. Connect directly to your preferred prime brokers, lenders, investors, custodians, exchanges, OTC desks and more, or meet them on Talos. Get started at Talos.com

• Subscribe to the Coin Metrics State of the Network newsletter 

Check out this episode!

Rob Behnke, co-founder and CEO of Halborn joins the show. In this episode we discuss:

• Rob’s career journey in the cryptocurrency industry and the insights that led him to founding Halborn.
• The 2017 ICO era and the security issues that plagued many projects.
• How Halborn approaches engagements with DeFi ecosystem participants.
• How centralized financial services companies are engaging with DeFi and how these firms think about cybersecurity.
• How Rob and his co-founder Steven Walbroehl approached their Series A fundraising process.
• Halborn’s new suite of software products.

To learn more about Halborn visit halborn.com and follow Rob on Twitter

Check out this episode!

Matt and Nic return for news and deals of the week. In this episode:

• What caused the Pound Sterling to sell off?
• Deglobalization picks up
• Stirrings of a sovereign debt crisis emerge
• Explaining Deribit’s insider-led down round
• Can the market recover before Do Kwon, Machinsky, and 3AC are dealt with?
• Celcius’ Machinsky steps down
• Brett Harrison leaves FTX US
• 7 states issue C&Ds against Nexo
• The CFTC goes after Ooki DAO and DAO members
• The CFTC serves Ooki through a chatbox and a forum post
• How voting in a DAO can cause you to incur personal liability
• Why putting a DAO in a ‘legal wrapper’ might make sense
• The Fed will not pursue a digital dollar (for now)
• The ‘convenience yield’ of holding a CFTC
• OTB Bingo
• Would it be good for Bitcoin to be flippened?

Sponsor notes:

• Talos powers institutional access to the entire digital assets ecosystem via a single-point of entry. Connect directly to your preferred prime brokers, lenders, investors, custodians, exchanges, OTC desks and more, or meet them on Talos. Get started at Talos.com

• Subscribe to the Coin Metrics State of the Network newsletter 

Check out this episode!

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode: 

• Kim Kardashian settles with the SEC
• Gensler’s promotional campaign ruffles feathers at the SEC
• Was the SEC indirectly throwing shade at Jake Paul with their video?
• Is Gensler cracking down on crypto as part of a bid for Treasury secretary?
• Can the industry outlast the SEC?
• CBOE signs on to Pyth
• Hamilton Lane is tokenizing three funds
• GoldenTree invests in Sushi
• Should DAOs pursue an LLC wrapper?
• Maker is buying Treasuries and IG debt
• Should stablecoins pass along interest from treasuries to tokenholders?
• Celsius executives cashed out prior to bankruptcy
• Starry Night NFTs are on the move
• Ark Invest partners to put their active strategies on the Eaglebrook platform

Sponsor notes:

• Talos powers institutional access to the entire digital assets ecosystem via a single-point of entry. Connect directly to your preferred prime brokers, lenders, investors, custodians, exchanges, OTC desks and more, or meet them on Talos. Get started at Talos.com

• Subscribe to the Coin Metrics State of the Network newsletter 

Check out this episode!

Vivek Raman, Head of Proof of Stake at BitOoda joins the show. In this episode we discuss:

• Vivek’s career journey from traditional financial services to the world of public blockchains.
• Views on the impact of Ethereum’s transition to proof of stake, including his perspective on the new financial products on the horizon.
• The path of CeFi as it relates to DeFi and where Vivek sees overlap.
• How BitOoda is working with bitcoin miners to manage risk.
• The smart contract platform category and how Vivek stays current on the latest developments in the industry.

To learn more about BitOoda visit their website. Follow Vivek on Twitter.

Check out this episode!

Alexandra DaCosta (CEO) and David Yi (Chief Commercial Officer) join the show to talk about Aspen Creek Digital Corp.’s fundraise and their model for additive renewable mining. In this episode:

• What was it like raising for a mining firm in this environment
• David and Alexandra’s backgrounds and how the came to cofound ACDC
• Why ACDC is pursuing a ‘power first’ model and what that means
• ACDC’s wind, solar, and battery approach to energy
• Why ACDC focuses on additional, new renewable generation
• How mining behind the meter with renewable sources actually works
• Why intermittency of wind and solar is not a dealbreaker for Bitcoin miners
• The merits of going behind the meter for a Bitcoin miner
• The importance of the Inflation Reduction Act for renewables
• Industries are becoming more location agnostic overall
• Are Bitcoin miners doing a sufficiently good job of disclosures around their energy mix?
• What is the feasibility of batteries at grid scale?
• Are Bitcoin miners interfering with the market signal indicating where transmission should be built?
• How Aspen Creek pairs demand response with renewable incentivization
• How Aspen Creek affects power prices paid by households

Read more:

• Aspen Creek’s fundraise announcement  
• ACDigitalCorp website

Intro and outro music: Daniel Allan’s Collage #344

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Sergey Gorbunov, co-founder of Axelar joins the show. In this episode we discuss:

• Sergey’s path to founding Axelar
• His views on blockchain interoperability and the design decisions of Axelar
• The different approaches to interoperability that are being attempted in the industry
• Views on DeFi composability and the role of privacy on public blockchains
• The L1/L2 landscape and how Axelar is positioned

To learn more about Axelar visit axelar.network/

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In this episode, Christine Kim from Galaxy Research joins us to discuss the Ethereum Merge and prospects for future protocol development: 

• Reactions to the merge and network changes that flew under the radar
• Finding a focus area in core protocol development on Ethereum
• EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals) on the near-term horizon
• Threats to decentralization and censorship resistance and potential solutions

Intro and outro music: Daniel Allan’s Collage #344

Check out this episode!

Nic and Matt sit down for a special live recording of OTB in front of an audience at the Boston Blockchain Week. In this episode: 

• Ian Balina is dinged by the SEC for Sparkster
• The SEC’s weird argument for standing over all of Ethereum
• Is XRP a prediction market on Ripple’s case against the SEC
• Wintermute is hacked for $160m via a bad vanity generator
• Several Senators file an amicus brief to support Custodia’s lawsuit against the Fed
• What the Congressional crypto agenda should look like
• Europe finalizes their MiCA regulation
• Europe discourages Dollar stablecoin usage in the EU
• Exchanges and token issuers in the EU will have to make disclosures
• Jesse Powell steps down from Kraken
• NASDAQ is launching a crypto custody business
• Helium strikes a deal with T Mobile
• Audience Q&A

Sponsor notes:

• Talos powers institutional access to the entire digital assets ecosystem via a single-point of entry. Connect directly to your preferred prime brokers, lenders, investors, custodians, exchanges, OTC desks and more, or meet them on Talos. Get started at Talos.com

• Subscribe to the Coin Metrics State of the Network newsletter 

Check out this episode!

Matt and Nic return for another week of news and deals. In this episode: 

• The Merge takes place without incident
• Will the Merge silence Ethereum critics on the left?
• Will the ESG narrative around crypto get louder?
• FTX takes a stake in Skybridge
• Castle Island is not an island
• If you make an NFT of a diamond and destroy the diamond, do you still have a diamond?
• CME launches Ether options
• Starbucks launches an NFT loyalty platform
• Tungsten cubes are selling off
• South Korea issues an arrest warrant for Do Kwon
• The thin line between visionary and scammer
• What Terra teaches us about why disclosures matter in capital markets
• Huobi delists privacy coins
• Can you take delivery of Tornado Cash-dusted Ether?
• Coinbase launches their Crypto Action Network
• Matt and Nic evaluate the ratings members of Congress are getting from Coinbase
• Chainalysis releases their 2022 global crypto adoption index
• Hodlnaut’s CSW case begins
• The NSA Bitcoin lab leak hypothesis
• OTB goes live!

Mentioned in this episode:

• Jake Chervinsky’s thread on Tornado Cash
• Chainalysis 2022 Global Crypto Adoption Report

Sponsor notes:

• Talos powers institutional access to the entire digital assets ecosystem via a single-point of entry. Connect directly to your preferred prime brokers, lenders, investors, custodians, exchanges, OTC desks and more, or meet them on Talos. Get started at Talos.com

• Subscribe to the Coin Metrics State of the Network newsletter and read their Mapping out the Merge report

Check out this episode!