Blockchain Innovation: Interviewing The Brightest Minds In Blockchain

Brendan Lee is the CEO & Co-Founder of Nodesmith. He holds a master’s degree in Computer Science, and has spent much of his career building developer platforms. In this episode, Brendan and I discuss:

• The complexities around running a full node and how Nodesmith solves that problem
• We go over some of the concerns developers and engineers may have. For example, if you outsource your full node, who controls the keys? Or, what are Nodesmith’s API standards?
• And, from an economic perspective, we look at the Nodesmith business model – “Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)”

Sascha Mojtahedi is the CEO of Bunz. The Bunz App uses its BTZ token to facilitate peer-to-peer bartering and purchases, while also compensating users for interacting with partner brands. In this episode, Sascha and I discuss:

• The $325 billion-dollar “data and attention economy” Bunz is tapping into
• The difference between the Brave Browser BAT (Basic Attention Token) model and the Bunz BTZ (Bunz Trading Zone) model
• The simple yet clever business model that Bunz uses to drive revenue while generously compensating its users – what Sascha calls, “the 60% promise”

Philipp Pieper is the CEO & Co-Founder of Swarm. He has held various private equity and management positions at Deutsche Bank and Allianz Group.

Philipp is a serial tech entrepreneur and discovered Blockchain after an encounter with the founder of BitTorrent.

In this episode, we discuss:

• The history of ICOs
• Whether it makes sense to tokenize traditional securities
• The 3 components of the Swarm system – tokenization, compliance, and decentralization
• How Swarm, as an open-source non-profit entity, differentiates itself from other players in the STO market

Michael Foland is the President and Co-Founder of TaxToken. His mission is to make TaxToken, “the ultimate cryptocurrency tax solution.” TaxToken leverages blockchain technology and artificial intelligence to modernize cryptocurrency accounting.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Why you should file your crypto taxes and why 2019 is a good year to do that
• Exactly what problem TaxToken aims to solve and what makes them the best solution
• Challenges associated with filing your crypto taxes (like how does the tax-man treat quirky crypto events like hard-forks and airdrops).

Lane Retting works at the Ethereum Foundation. He is a hacker and polyglot with an affinity for East Asian languages.

In this episode, Lane and I discuss:

• The journey to a brand new Ethereum – Ethereum 2.0 (code named “Serenity”). We discuss what Serenity’s roadmap looks like, and when it’s expected to ship
• We discuss Lane’s work on ewasm
• And of course, we discuss governance, proof-of-stake, sharding, “Plasma,” and much more!