My guests today are 0xTranqui aka Max and Salief Lewis, two of the four co-founders of Lifeworld, the startup that's creating River. River is a blockchain media protocol. In its launch configuration, users can sign in with Privy, register accounts on a smart contract on Optimism, and post references to IPFS-hosted media as calldata to a smart contract on Arbitrum Nova. The team's first-party UI, river.ph, evokes social media collection website are.na. It was great getting to know more about River at such an early stage. I hope you enjoy the show. As always, this show is provided as entertainme ..read more

My guest today is Pete Horne, founder of 4th Energy. Pete is a veteran programmer who thinks deeply about the EVM and computation. With 4th.energy, Pete is exploring how the EVM can be used to serve applications directly from the blockchain. In this vision, application data is verifiably stored on one or multiple of the EVMs connected to L1 Ethereum. With this technology, programmers and users would be able to permissionlessly distribute and run user-facing applications without the gatekeeping limitations of app stores or centralized cloud providers. By transforming the EVM into a dynamic appl ..read more

My guest today is Alex Masmej, founder of Drakula, Showtime, and $ALEX token. Alex's new app, Drakula, is a so-called SocialFi mixture of TikTok, friend.tech, Farcaster, and $DEGEN. On this episode, Alex and I discuss consumer crypto product iteration methodology, team composition, how to sustain setbacks including departing co-founders, the bear market, owing the tax man, and US work visas. We also get into the power of taste, long term vision, and community in building crypto products. It was fantastic chatting with Alex who is a dynamic and unique voice at the intersection of crypto and con ..read more

My guest today is Partha Ramanujam, co-founder of Etherspot. Etherspot is a 4337 Account Abstraction service provider. On this episode, Partha and I discuss the Pillar personal data locker, and how it led them to account abstraction and founding Etherspot. We get into the details of their AA Bundler, React library, and embedded wallet services. We also discuss the exciting new p2p bundler they've been working on, which is seeing adoption from peers in the space. It was great getting to know more about Partha and Etherspot. I hope you enjoy the show. As always, this show is provided as entertai ..read more

My guest today is Cameron Robertson, founder of Arx. Arx is an NFC chip with a ECDSA private key. On this episode, Cameron and I dive into the devices and protocols at the intersection of NFC and blockchain. We discuss tamper resistance, signing APIs, and the interaction patterns available in today's mobile device ecosystem. It was great learning more about Arx from Cameron. This episode was recorded in person at EthDenver. I hope you enjoy the show. As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestio ..read more

My guest today is Haseeb Awan, founder of Efani. Efani is a telephone service provider for people and companies that are concerned about SIM swapping. On this episode, Haseeb and I dive into his history founding the original Bitcoin ATM network as a computer science student in Canada, going to YC, and becoming an American citizen. We dive into the details of Efani, his new company, which provides $99 a month US eSIM phone plans with an 11-factor process for SIM swapping that makes it very difficult to SIM jack their customers. It was great learning more about Haseeb's journey and how Efani is ..read more

My guest today is Andrew Huang, founder of Conduit. Conduit is a rollup as a service provider, which lets anyone deploy their own rollup in only a few clicks. Conduit operates Zora, Aevo, Mode, Frame, Public Goods Network, and several other rollups, and each of these ships with a suite of helpful infrastructure like robust RPCs, block explorers. On this episode, Andrew and I discuss the ins-and-outs of 1-click L2 and L3 rollups deployments, the costs of running a Superchain rollup, and the different data availability options available today, including L1, Celestia, and AnyTrust. Andrew also sh ..read more

My guest today is Jango, co-founder of Juicebox Protocol, Revnets, Defifa, and Bananpus. Launched in 2021, Juicebox is a programmable fundraising protocol that has processed more than $180 million of contributions to over 1000 projects, from culture DAOs to open source projects. Most recently, Juicebox Protocol facilitated over 300 ETH in donations to the legal defense fund for Tornado Cash developers Alexey Pertsev and Roman Storm. Juicebox's core mechanic issues receipt tokens for each contribution to a given project, which can be redeemed at a later date for a portion of the remaining treas ..read more

My guest today is Vidy Thatte, co-founder of Trace. Trace is a website that lets you build SwiftUI components with LLM text prompts, screenshots, and drawings on a canvas. In short, Trace lets you build iPhone apps with AI. On this episode, Vidy and I take a walk down memory lane, chronicling his illustrious history of app development projects and startups that led him to where he is today. We discuss the technical details of how the current version of Trace uses GPT-4 and a code database to create smooth feeling UIs, and how powerful Trace may become in the future. It was excellent getting a ..read more

My guest today is Nick Dodson, co-founder and CEO of Fuel. Fuel is a moduler execution layer that's designed to facilitate performant L2 rollups. On this episode, Nick and I discuss the history of rollup design, the scaling challenges facing the EVM, and how his years of experience writing Solidity, EVM Assembly, and participating in the EIP process contributed to Fuel's design. We dive into Fuel's underlying UTXOs model, which allows Fuel nodes to validate transactions in parallel across multiple cores simultaneously. Finally we discuss Predicates, which are stateless conditions that can be a ..read more