It's a crypto/blockchain podcast, but very technical, it's focused around the advanced technology that makes up the ecosystem (zero-knowledge cryptography, multi-party computation, consensus algorithms, miner-extractable value, new blockchain programming languages, etc).
Very technical, almost nothing about investing. The downside, some episodes may be a bit hard to jump into due to the technical nature.
One project I'm following is Aztec Protocol. It's an Ethereum L2 (so faster & cheaper transactions, similar to Lightning) but it supports any Ethereum asset (ETH, USDC, WBTC) and is fully private.
> What serious borrower needs to pay 10% to access credit?
People who can make more than 10% trading?
Lending protocols aren't doing anything different than what banks do: allocating inactive capital to those who can make use of that capital and are willing to pay for it.
Interest rates are high because of A: market volatility, professional traders can easily make more than 10%, and B: information asymmetry, large capital pools haven't allocated to these pools.
Flash loans themselves are not an application, it's a primitive that other applications can build on top of.
There's many applications like DeFiSaver that use flash loans to allow users to migrate debt between lending protocols without needing additional capital.
The same reason that Bitcoin hasn't been displaced by newer projects.
Both have massive network effects. Marginal technology improvements aren't enough to convince developers to build on a platform that has no users, no application & no infrastructure.
Exactly, Ethereum is a better Store of Value than Bitcoin, not only because it is scarce, but because it provides utility, which creates demand.
People need ETH for:
* Paying transaction fees to use the network. For example, Visa is now settling payments with card issuers using USDC on Ethereum, so Visa needs to pay these fees with ETH.
* Collateral in financial applications: Over 11 million ETH (over $24 billion) have been locked as collateral in various financial protocols
* Staking & validating: In the same way that Bitcoin miners must purchase mining hardware to earn money, Eth2 validators must purchase ETH to earn staking rewards
The most innovation is happening in financial products. There's no way for a developer or entrepreneur to experiment building in traditional finance without the support from large financial institutions. But in DeFi, there are financial applications built by teams in India, Africa, SE Asia, etc.
If you want an example of one innovation, look at flash loans. Flash loans provide the ability to atomicly borrow infinite money for the duration of a transaction, with no collateral or credit. This money can be used for arbitraging or just to provide working capital for a complex operation. If the loan isn't repaid by the end of the transaction, the whole transaction is cancelled.
Do you consider earning interest to be speculation?
I can put stablecoins (crypto dollars) in a lending protocol like Aave and earn ~10% APY. Compare that to my savings account, which pays out 0.25% APY.
Or how about the stablecoins themselves? MakerDAO creates the Dai stablecoin, backed by crypto-native assets like ETH & BTC.
I have a number of friends in Argentina who are surviving hyper-inflation by keeping their wealth in stablecoins.
Bitcoin isn't valuable because of its technical properties, just like gold isn't valuable because of its physical properties.
Both are valuable because of their universally recognized scarcity and value. If you want to put your wealth in a SoV cryptocurrency, Bitcoin is the clear schelling point.
Ether will remain competitive with BTC, it may even flip it in market cap, but I doubt Bitcoin will ever go away.
Short answer: no, there's only one Ethereum and one ETH asset
Long answer: The beacon chain _will_ run in parallel until the two chains are merged. Until that time, ETH in the Beacon Chain isn't transferable, so effectively not a separate asset.
However, exchanges are offering Eth2 staking derivatives which they're branding as "ETH2". But it should be remembered that this is a derivative, not a separate M0 asset.
It's a crypto/blockchain podcast, but very technical, it's focused around the advanced technology that makes up the ecosystem (zero-knowledge cryptography, multi-party computation, consensus algorithms, miner-extractable value, new blockchain programming languages, etc).
Very technical, almost nothing about investing. The downside, some episodes may be a bit hard to jump into due to the technical nature.