Validated

Solana Foundation

When it comes to blockchain, the thing people talk about most — the price — is actually the least interesting part. Crypto conversations are too often about who’s up and who’s down, what to buy and what to sell, and today’s drama on Twitter. Most conversations about crypto miss how it’s going to change ... everything. On VALIDATED, we’ll be talking to the people who are rethinking the internet — and our world. No hype cycles. No financial advice. Just conversations on the biggest ideas shaping the future of the internet. Web3 is complicated, but never boring.

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Top 10 Validated Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Validated episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Validated for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Validated episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

Tommy & Taylor Johnson - Co-Founders, PsyOptions Ep #51

Validated

11/02/21 • 41 min

Tommy and Taylor are the founders of PsyOptions, a DAO developing the leading options primitives on Solana.

00:09 - Introduction and Origin Story

04:04 - What are the challenges / improvements in Solana?

11:49 - Integration of Serum v3

14:32 - Adoption of PsyOptions

17:19 - Architecting the system

22:11 - Liquidity mining vs. options trading

26:27 - Background in trading options

28:05 - DeFi vs. Traditional finance products

30:56 - Gaming as a market

32:56 - Exciting things out of the hackathon

34:09 - Announcements for PsyOptions

37:53 - If Solana could change one thing?

DISCLAIMER

The information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.

The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.

The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.

Anatoly (00:09):

Hey folks, this is Anatoly and you're listening to The Solana Podcast. And today I have with me Tommy and Taylor, co-founders of the PsyOptions protocol. Awesome to have you guys.

Tommy (00:18):

Thanks for having us.

Taylor (00:19):

Thanks for having us.

Anatoly (00:21):

Cool. So what's the origin story? How did you guys get into crypto and what made you build PsyOptions?

Tommy (00:27):

Crypto, it goes back to... I remember watching the Ethereum ICO, just being a broke college student, but felt we were too broke to actually throw anything into and that's a big regret, but that shaped up how we got into Solana later on. Really dove deep into everything back in 2017, right before the summer hype. And then in the summer hype, tried developing a little bit on Ethereum, doing some solidity development in the spare time, but I never jumped full time into it until PsyOptions. Taylor has a little bit of a different history with crypto.

Taylor (01:03):

Yeah. I've actually been full-time in crypto since late 2017, after Tommy and I shut down a previous business we started in school. We were looking for different things to do and I knew crypto had a lot of hype in 2017. I was like, "All right, this is definitely an industry I could see myself being a part of." I eventually took a job at Blockfolio and then as well as doing some freelance solidity development and then been full-time ever since.

Anatoly (01:27):

How did you guys meet? What was the genesis for you guys to go build PsyOptions?

Tommy (01:32):

Well, Taylor and I are twins, so we met a long, long time ago. We've always been hacking on ideas and stuff. And I guess, Taylor had his eye on Solana from 2018, right Taylor?

Taylor (01:47):

Yeah, pretty early on. I remember Multicoin writing about it. I was like, "Oh, this is actually a really sweet architecture, solves a lot of problems that we saw in Ethereum." And kept following before Mainnet beta was launched.

Tommy (01:59):

Yeah. And so we had been tinkering around, created a GitHub organization last summer, like the same one we're using now and just started reading the documentation. And then had a few projects we tried in the fall that never really took off. And then in October we were surfing with Tristan from FTX and he was just talking about Serum and everything that they were working on. So we knew what was in the pipeline and had that in the back of our mind. We did the first hackathon, did in place, built a trusted third party Oracle. And then after that had an issue with TradFi, trying to get API access to automate a options trading strategy, and that was what kicked it off. We were for fresh off that first hackathon, wanted a fresh idea, had our feet wet in Solana. And it was like, "Taylor, what if we just built options into the blockchain? We can get this API access built in. We have the order book already there, there's some basic infrastructure." And that was the genesis.

Anatoly (02:59):

That's awesome. Limited access to data was one of the reasons I started building this thing. Because I used to try to build stupid deep learning models on interactive brokers and you never have access to data. It's always even the quality is really suspects. It's like, "Do I really know that this is where things got executed? Or did they just copy and paste stuff from a database with a bunch of errors?"<...

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Larry Cermak - VP Research, The Block Ep #50

Validated

10/26/21 • 44 min

Larry Cermak joined The Block as one of the first employees with the mission to provide professionals with accurate information about crypto. He now leads a 30-person research team that delivers insights to institutional customers.

00:09 - Intro

00:20 - Larry Cermak’s origin story / His work at The Block

08:25 - The fundamentals of Bitcoin

16:03 - The value of SushiSwap

19:35 - Investing based on Memes

23:42 - Market Value for future gains in Crypto

26:12 - Will NFTs be backing internet money?

28:44 - Thoughts on Algorithmic Stablecoins

31:00 - Regulation in the US

34:47 - Decentralization and tokens in the context of regulation

39:45 - Volume of users / social networks

DISCLAIMER

The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.

Anatoly (00:09):

Hey folks, this is Anatoly, and you're listening to The Solana Podcast. And today I have Larry Cermak, who's the VP of Research at The Block. Awesome to have you, man.

Larry Cermak (00:18):

Nice to be on, it's a pleasure.

Anatoly (00:20):

Yeah, so tell me your origin story. How'd you get into crypto?

Larry Cermak (00:24):

Yeah, it's probably slightly longer. But really high-level, I got involved in late 2016, I was in college in the US and was thinking about what to do my thesis on and Bitcoin seemed like one of the more obvious options, to not make it incredibly boring, so I just decided to go with that. And throughout the research process, I just kind of found that there isn't good research about Bitcoin, just in general crypto. There was either the super bullish people that were like all in on Bitcoin, or super bearish academics, and there nothing in between, and I felt like I can fill the gap a little bit.

So after I published that research, I shared it publicly as well with a few people, and based on that I got my first job offer to work at Diar which is a research company, focusing only on crypto. So I worked there for a couple of years, and really just tried to focus on data driven research, which now it sounds kind of obvious, but back then it just wasn't very common. Most people were just looking at the really simple metrics and munging data, but mostly it was just price discussion, price predictions, all that stuff. And we were really looking at just analyzing the market a little bit more fundamentally, that sounds even more silly now looking back.

And I got lucky that in 2017 when I joined full time, like early 2017 I joined full time, and that's when everything popped off massively, and it was just a bunch of shit ICOs, like a lot of sketchy stuff. I consciously started looking more into these projects, so I was one of the people that were kind of cautioning against some of the ICO stuff, and it was a lot of fun but I was quite skeptical back then still. So actually, a lot of people who have followed me for a while, they know initially I was a no-coiner, I had no crypto, and I was convinced that initially actually that a lot of this is just kind of hype mania, it's just all like overblown massively. But something really drew me into it, and it was mostly the permissionless nature, ability for anyone to participate, but what really I didn't like was just the hype around it, the marketing, the emptiness, and all that stuff.

So I over-focused on that I think initially, but after some time, I realized that that's probably not what this is all about. Initially, I didn't think that it was necessarily important for most projects to have tokens and I was very skeptical that most tokens need a project, and I started massively changing my mind on this with the DeFi beginnings. So early 2020 my mind started completely changing on most of the space and I stared allocating a little bit more, and now I also do seed investing privately. And obviously, I lead the research department at The Block which is now 25 researches, probably the largest research team in crypto.

Anatoly (03:33):

So you went from Bitcoin skeptic to full shit-coiner.

Larry Cermak (03:38):

Kind of, yeah. It's a little bit concerning honestly.

Anatoly (03:42):

In four years....

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Dan Gunsberg - Co-Founder of Hxro Ep #41

Validated

04/19/21 • 39 min

We are excited to have Dan Gunsberg, Co-Founder of Hxro, sitting down with us for Episode 41. During this discussion, Dan talks about his history in traditional finance, how this experience guided him to building out Hxro, the importance of community, and the powerful disruptions he believes are going to happen over the next few years.

00:25 – Dan’s crypto story and what’s Hxro?

05:38 – Centralized crypto exchanges vs legacy exchanges

15:07 – Community capitalism

24:11 – Community building around projects

35:23 – Closing thoughts and what’s next for Hxro

DISCLAIMER

The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.

Sergey Nazarov - Co-Founder of Chainlink Ep #33

Validated

01/01/21 • 68 min

In this episode, Sergey talks about how he originally got into crypto, the origin story of Chainlink, the critical importance of smart contracts in growing the blockchain ecosystem, and more. Tune in for this very special episode with the Co-Founder of Chainlink, Sergey Nazarov.

DISCLAIMER

The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.

Michael Shaulov - CEO & Co-founder of Fireblocks Ep #32

Validated

12/04/20 • 51 min

DISCLAIMER

The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.

A Deep Dive Into DeFi With FTX, Aave, Balancer, Curve, Gauntlet, and Solana Ep #30

Validated

11/06/20 • 65 min

This is a special episode of The Solana Podcast - we took a recent panel for the Solana Wormhole Hackathon and converted into audio format for you! Enjoy this deep dive into all things DeFi with industry leaders.

Sam Bankman-Fried

Sam Bankman-Fried is the CEO of crypto derivatives exchange FTX and Alameda Research. He majored in Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and graduated in 2014.

Stani Kulechov

Stani is the founder and CEO of Aave and ETHLend. He is a seasoned entrepreneur with extensive experience developing technology in the crypto, blockchain, and fintech space.

Michael Egorov

Michael is the CEO of Curve and a physicist and scientist from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

Anatoly Yakovenko

Anatoly is the creator of Proof of History and co-founder of Solana. He led development of operating systems at Qualcomm, distributed systems at Mesosphere, and compression at Dropbox.

Jeremy Musighi

Head of Growth at Balaner

Tarun Chitra

Founder and CEO of Gauntlet Networks, a research company aiming to make crypto networks and their governance interpretable and statistically sound.

DISCLAIMER

The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.

Scalability and Cross-Chain Bridges Ep #55

Validated

12/02/21 • 19 min

Live from Breakpoint 2021, Austin Federa (Solana Labs) moderates a discussion about the transfer layer and cross-chain bridges with Hendrik Hofstadt (Jump Crypto), Bryan Pellegrino (LayerZero), Alex Smirnov (deBridge) and Andriy Velykyy (Allbridge.io).

00:10 - Intro

02:50 - The importance of bridges not relying on Trust

04:28 - Moving wrapped assets

12:00 - Capital Efficiency of Bridges

14:02 - Future of bridges

16:28 - Integration of bridges

DISCLAIMER

The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.

Austin (00:10):

All right. Welcome guys. We're here to talk today about the transfer layer, scalability, cross chain bridging, the technical problems, the operational problem, the UX problems. This is just a panel of problems today, but it's also a panel on opportunities. We've seen a huge amount bridge over between other protocols in solana between other protocols and other protocols. We think of bridges as something new, but bridges are how DeFi has used Bitcoin as collateral for quite a long time at this point. It's kind of funny to think about how this started as we're taking an asset that's considered quite stable and solid that has no smart contract ability and being able to use that in Ethereum and that early day work really set the stage for, I think, a lot of what we're seeing today.

Austin (00:55):

But bridges go far beyond just this idea of how do I move something from chain A to chain B. There's roles in them as being decentralized ways to pass messages between different chains. There's a role for them in making users feel safe about trading across chains, and there's a role about them, about creating an exit ramp too. So that if you do something like buy an NFT for $69 million, you're not dependent on one chain to hold that. There's an ability migrate in a decentralized and trustless way. So we're getting into a bunch of that today. I'd say, let's just go ahead down the line and give a quick introduce to yourself and your project.

Hendrik (01:31):

Sure. I'm Hendrick. I'm with Jump Crypto and as Jump Crypto we're core contributors to Wormhole, which is a cross chain messaging protocol, connecting high value chains. And message passing in this sense means anything can flow between these high value chains, meaning assets and data. So your coins, NFTs, but also governance decisions and more information like as a base layer for developers to build on top of.

Bryan (01:54):

Bryan from LayerZero. Our focus is purely generic messaging interop. High level is connect every contract on every chain to every contract on every other chain.

Alex (02:05):

Hi everyone. My name is Alex Smirnoff and I'm co-founder of the deBridge Protocol, which is cross chain interoperability and liquidity transfer protocol. So the protocol itself allows to breach any arbitrary assets or data between any blockchains including solana of course, down the road.

Andriy (02:23):

Hi I'm Andriy from Allbridge, I'm a co-founder there. We currently support seven blockchains, and I hope that this number would increase to 12 by the end of the year. We started in July and since July, we bridged to solana one point half billion worth of assets.

Austin (02:44):

It's great to see. So I want to start out with just a level set question and Andriy, we'll start with you. Why is it important for a bridge to not rely on trust?

Andriy (02:54):

You see, when we speak about trusted bridges and trustless bridges, and that is the question, I suppose?

Austin (03:00):

Yes.

Andriy (03:01):

We have to consider that while we all here are building decentralized future, which should be completely trustless, in my personal opinion, sometimes we may sacrifice some layer of some level of decentralization to provide faster and better user experience. Because we are, in the end of the day, we are limited by the technology. And I have been thinking a lot about that because in the very end, we are building for our users and we want to create the product that would be used and used easily. And when we, in some cases, add too much of decentralization, that...

Kain Warwick - Synthetix Founder Ep #26

Validated

09/03/20 • 50 min

With over 924 million in value locked, Synthetix is a popular platform for derivatives trading in decentralized finance (DeFi). Kain Warwick and Anatoly discuss the early days of DeFi along with the pros and cons of the plethora of products hitting the decentralized finance market. This episode is for anyone looking to get a better understanding of how decentralized finance works- Kain and Anatoly abstract away the complexity riddled in DeFi and cover the fundamentals.

DISCLAIMER

The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.

ukraine.sol Ep #60

Validated

03/04/22 • 16 min

On a special episode of the Solana Podcast, Sergey Vasylchuk (CEO, Everstake) talks about Aid for Ukraine, a DAO created by Everstake and endorsed by the government of Ukraine and Anatoly Yakovenko to support Ukraine during the ongoing crisis — and how it came together on Nation.

00:38 - Intro
02:51 - Origin of the initiative / How it works
06:25 - Ukrainian government receiving FIAT currency
09:13 - Banking, a legacy system
10:04 - News on the ground
12:39 - What can people do to get involved

DISCLAIMER

The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.

Austin (00:09):

Hello, and welcome to a special episode of the Solana podcast, I'm Austin Federa. Today we're joined by Sergey Vasylchuk, who's the CEO of Everstake, but we're actually not here to talk today about Everstake. We're here to talk about aid for Ukraine, and the situation in Ukraine and the project that Sergey and a bunch of others from the Ukraine and connected to the Ukraine have launched. Which is a fundraising effort to help raise money that's urgently needed for the government and for people there. Sergey welcome and thanks for joining us today.

Sergey Vasylchuk (00:39):

Yeah. Hi guys. Thank you for listening and thank you for helping us in this difficult situation. And yeah,the situation in Ukraine is quite terrible. So we have been protecting our country for close to a week and we are struggling with one of the biggest armies in the world. But we still resist and sure, we'll win soon. But this will need... It's not just a magic maker, many of the people trying to protect their country, military are dying, military are fighting, the civilian are also trying to do all they can. And generalization is that every citizen of the Ukraine, it doesn't depend where he is located and what he can do, they do something. I do not know anyone who just sits in the idle and observes the news. First, probably two days for me was shock.

I cannot believe what has happened. I was just stuck to the news and seeing what is going on, calling some relatives, asking what I can do to help and what's going on? It's just shock. And I was stuck, but sooner or later, I had the conversation with Anatoly Yakovenko from Solana, he is originally Ukrainian. He asked me, "Hey guys, what is going on? How are we going to help you? Let's do something." I said, "Yeah, I cannot sit and cry, and wait and I need to do something." And it was the case when we started to understand that we need some impact. And that's why we decided to start this activity.

Austin (02:17):

So the process here that's been running on is there's Ukraine.soul, which is a Bonfida name routing layer address, that routes to a wallet that's controlled by a MultiSig Dow on Solana. You can go to nation.io/dow/Ukraine, you can see this there too. There's about $1.45 million contributed so far, as well as several NFTs from projects that will also be sold and liquidated to generate funds here. There's a lot of different efforts, raising different kinds of crypto to aid the government and the people. What was sort of your thought to do this, to start this up? And can you talk a little bit about how the country's actually involved as well in the government?

Sergey Vasylchuk (02:59):

Well we have quite an unusual ministry, which called Ministry of the Digital Transformation. It was created a few years ago, and many of the politicians were skeptical and it was a bit like late in the day. It's just few guys from the IT ground. They will not change nothing. But for the least two year guys made the great application. We probably have the digital ID have digital, driver license, have the digital vaccination certificate, whatever. So it go digital. The many of the services, the country are become in our smartphone. And those guys are quite trustworthy and respectable in our community. They just start to accept the donation, in any form of the money that is available. And you should understand that currently there is marshal law in the Ukraine and central bank put limitation that is hard to transact in the foreign countries, foreign currency, sorry for us is Euro a dollar.

So for ex...

Michael Wagner - CEO & Co-Founder of Star Atlas Ep #38

Validated

03/29/21 • 46 min

Michael Wagner and Anatoly Yakovenko sit down to talk all things Star Atlas. Star Atlas is a grand strategy game of space exploration, territorial conquest, and political domination being built on Solana.

00:48: Who is Michael Wagner and What is Star Atlas?

18:34: ATLAS and POLIS: Development of game economy

23:12: Developer ecosystem

25:40: Roadmap

34:19: Metaverse and VR

38:11: Decentralization of Star Atlas

43:29: Future Concerns

DISCLAIMER

The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.

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FAQ

How many episodes does Validated have?

Validated currently has 155 episodes available.

What topics does Validated cover?

The podcast is about Blockchain, Bitcoin, Tech, Web3, Ethereum, Software, Crypto, Podcast, Podcasts, Technology, Education, Business, Informational and Careers.

What is the most popular episode on Validated?

The episode title 'Larry Cermak - VP Research, The Block Ep #50' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on Validated?

The average episode length on Validated is 45 minutes.

How often are episodes of Validated released?

Episodes of Validated are typically released every 7 days, 6 hours.

When was the first episode of Validated?

The first episode of Validated was released on Jul 19, 2019.

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Validated

Solana Foundation

Top 10 Validated Episodes

FAQ

How many episodes does Validated have?

What topics does Validated cover?

What is the most popular episode on Validated?

What is the average episode length on Validated?

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When was the first episode of Validated?

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