Podcast

Ismael Hishon-Rezaizadeh is the Co-Founder & CEO at Lagrange Labs. Backed by 1kx, Daedalus, Maven 11 Capital, & more, Lagrange Labs enables seamless interaction between chains with cryptographically secure state proofs, not opaque intermediaries. Developers can now run expressive and dynamic distributed ZK computation at a Big Data scale on top of multi-chain contract states. In this episode we chat through what they’re building (in its fullness), their recent collaboration with EigenLayer, biggest surprises thus far in creating Lagrange Labs, best advice for crypto founders, & much more.

Matt Katz is CEO and Co-Founder of Caldera. Caldera specializes in building high-performance, customizable, and application-specific layer-two and layer-three blockchains. In this episode, Matt shares his thoughts on the modular blockchain ecosystem, how Caldera is enabling the growth and development of modular blockchains, and the Metalayer: Caldera's innovative interoperability ecosystem.

Soups Ranjan is the Co-Founder & CEO of Sardine. Backed by a16z, Visa, and more, Sardine offers safer, faster payments by combining risk, compliance, and payment protection – all from one powerful API. In this episode we talk about his past work heading up Fraud & Risk for Coinbase (2015–2019), Sardine’s strategy of earning the opportunity to handle payments by solving fraud first, their unique flywheel from fraud prevention to better data insights, their data consortium initiative, and much more.

Guy Young is the Founder & CEO of Ethena Labs. Backed by Huobi, Arthur Hayes, & more, Ethena Labs is all about unlocking the potential of staked Ethereum. Their main offerings are a delta-neutral stablecoin with embedded yield (called USDe), globally accessible floating & fixed rate USD-denominated bonds, and capital efficient and composable leverage. In this episode we discuss Guy’s journey to crypto from a $50b fund in TradFi, the mechanism and philosophy behind USDe (and why it works), most interesting trajectories for DeFi in 2023, the attitude of major TradFi institutions toward DeFi right now (despite the ETF excitement), and much more.

Tim Beiko is part of the Protocol Team at the Ethereum Foundation. In this role Tim orchestrates development teams focused on the core protocol—most notably for The Merge. In this episode we discuss Tim’s origin story in crypto, how Ethereum can serve as an economic testnet for new types of coordination in the world (and why that’s a valuable proposition), what he’s most excited about for the future of Ethereum, his advice for developers new to the crypto space, and much more.