May 13
Avenged Sevenfold Frontman M. Shadows: AI an 'Incredible Tool' for Musicians
The rapid growth of AI is forcing writers, artists, and musicians to grapple with how artificial intelligence will change the way they work. One musician who’s enthused about the possibilities is Avenged Sevenfold frontman Matt Sanders (a.k.a. M. Shadows), who told Decrypt’s gm podcast that “AI can be incredibly useful” for songwriters. “You're using AI to not only spark ideas, but you're using it a much quicker way to kind of get to some of these cool little nuggets of gold,” he said. “If you...
May 11
Why Heavy Metal Band Avenged Sevenfold Keeps Betting on NFTs
With millions of albums sold and a sizable global following, heavy metal band Avenged Sevenfold is arguably the largest music act building in the Web3 space today—from launching its own NFT-based club to helping ticketing giant Ticketmaster roll out token-gated ticket sales. Avenged Sevenfold frontman Matt Sanders (a.k.a. M. Shadows), himself an avid NFT collector and CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club member, recently joined Decrypt’s gm podcast. He detailed how the long-running band first e...
May 10
Why DeFi Cybersecurity Can Never Sleep
Having a bug bounty program to pay white hat hackers for reporting vulnerabilities is one thing. But staffing an always-on security desk to respond to those reports can be really expensive, said Immunefi founder and CEO Michell Amador. “Lots of people don't want to wake up on Sunday at 4 a.m. in the morning to deal with a report, and you can't know if the report is that serious hack, or if it's just spam” Amador said on a recent episode of gm from Decrypt. “And so [companies] contract us to prov...
May 4
Immunefi CEO's White Hat Pitch: 'None of The Bad Stuff. Instead, You're Going to be a Hero'
Web3 bug bounty platform Immunefi exists because it’s impossible to write completely secure code, said co-founder and CEO Mitchell Amador on the latest episode of gm from Decrypt podcast. But with billions of dollars running through the pipelines of cryptocurrency protocols, finding and fixing vulnerabilities has become a costly problem to solve. Just last month, Immunefi published a report showing the number of hacks and scams in the first quarter of 2023 rose 192% compared to the same period...
Apr 27
Kraken ‘Fighting the Fight’ Behind the Scenes With Regulators
Crypto exchange Kraken originally submitted an application for a Federal Reserve master account October 2020. And as its chief legal officer pointed, the U.S. central bank still hasn't rejected it. On Decrypt’s gm podcast, Marco Santori also said that the San Francisco-based firm was “fighting the fight” behind the scenes to get connected to the same FedNow network that all other big financial institutions use to settle transactions. Getting a master account is a hot topic in the crypto world...
Apr 26
Arthur Hayes: If You're Still in Traditional Banking System, Be Prepared to 'Take an L'
The original crypto bad boy Arthur Hayes still has a bone to pick with what he calls the “broken banking system.” Hayes, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX, said he sees crypto as an important asset for consumers to own as a hedge against risk from the traditional banking system. “I don’t care if you’re capitalist or a communist. Everybody put on a lot of debt. We’ve passed the point where that debt is becoming useful,” Hayes said during an interview for a recent episode of the g...
Apr 23
Normies Don’t 'Actually Care About Decentralization': Arthur Hayes
Decentralization may be core to crypto’s DNA, but the same cannot be said about people’s preferences when engaging with digital assets, said Arthur Hayes. The distribution of decision-making and control is an essential component of Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision for Bitcoin in 2008, well before the dawn of the digital assets industry. But Hayes, the former CEO of cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX, suggested this central tenet isn’t important to the masses. “At the end of the day, the average person d...
Apr 21
Arthur Hayes: Market Makers Knew They’d Be Front-Run on FTX—It Was 'Common Knowledge'
Anyone familiar with crypto trading had a pretty good “spidey sense” that something wasn't right with the now bankrupt digital asset exchange FTX, according to Arthur Hayes. The former BitMEX CEO claims just about everyone knew that the failed crypto exchange FTX was “a little bit shady,” but most investors in the company were blinded by greed, he says. In a scathing attack on the ethics of the broader crypto industry during a recent guest appearance on the gm from Decrypt podcast, Hayes said he...
Apr 9
Bitcoin’s Energy Transparency Is a Double-Edged Sword: Hut 8 Mining CEO
Conversations surrounding Bitcoin’s sustainability often touch on how much power the network consumes. But the mere fact that its power consumption is a known factor is notable, according to Canadian Bitcoin miner Hut 8’s CEO Jaime Leverton. “We see our energy use, really, as a feature of proof of work,” she said, referencing the process by which Bitcoin transactions are verified on the latest episode of Decrypt’s gm podcast. Critics like Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren have slammed Bi...
Apr 5
Is Texas Still 'Very Open for Business' for Bitcoin Mining?
Up until quite recently, Texas was “very open for business, as it were, for Bitcoin mining.” That’s how Jaime Leverton, CEO of Canadian Bitcoin miner Hut 8, put it on the latest episode of Decrypt’s gm podcast. “They have in West Texas, in particular, a lot of renewable assets that are looking for stable base loads like a Bitcoin miner can provide,” she said. “So I think it was just a really, really nice fit between the needs of the state and what a Bitcoin miner can uniquely provide as really...
Mar 29
Degens 'Ran Away With the Narrative' on Gitcoin’s NFT Drop With Vitalik, Says Founder Kevin Owocki
Earlier this month, Metalabel created an NFT collection in collaboration with the Web3 funding platform Gitcoin, and it briefly became a lightning rod of speculation for its connection to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. The collection paid homage to the concept of quadratic funding—a mechanism that underpins how around $70 million of donations have been distributed between projects on Gitcoin so far. It included a digitized version of a 2018 whitepaper that pioneered the subject, penned by...
Mar 22
Why True Decentralization at Scale Is Hard and Rare: Gnosis Co-Founder
Gnosis co-founder and COO Friederike Ernst doesn’t like seeing “decentralization” thrown around as a superficial marketing term. It’s why she takes such pride in the fact that it’s very affordable right now—1 GNO token, about $108 at the time of writing—to become a validator on the Gnosis Chain. For context, it costs 32 ETH, worth almost $58,000, to become a validator on the Ethereum network. That low bar to entry has helped the Gnosis Chain, one of the earliest Ethereum sidechains, amass more...
Mar 20
Coinbase Chief Legal Officer: What FTX Did Was ‘Flat-Out Fraud’
Last year’s collapse of the crypto exchange FTX resulted in a tectonic shift for the industry. Undermined confidence in the nascent sector compounded by unprecedented regulatory scrutiny are just some of the repercussions of those events, which revealed the mismanagement of billions of dollars of investors’ funds on the part of the exchange’s founder Sam Bankman-Fried and the affiliated companies. Speaking on Decrypt's gm podcast, Coinbase's chief legal officer Paul Grewal said “there’s no ques...
Mar 15
Coinbase Chief Legal Officer on SEC Crypto Approach: ‘Is This the Best We Can Do?’
Coinbase's chief legal officer Paul Grewal has launched another scathing attack on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Speaking on the Decrypt gm podcast, Grewal said he shares the concern “that we are losing the script a bit here in the United States when it comes to crypto and crypto regulation.” In February, the SEC imposed a $30 million fine on Kraken—another popular American crypto exchange—because its staking product allegedly violated securities laws. Coinbase responded to the n...
Mar 7
AI Still Has a Lot to Learn—and Unlearn: Ava Labs CEO
For all the buzz artificial intelligence has generated across the crypto industry, Ava Labs CEO Emin Gün Sirer isn’t impressed—yet. “We can’t all go into AI,” he said during a recent interview for the gm from Decrypt podcast. “The AI valuations are sky high. There’ll be some stuff there, maybe, but $30 billion valuations for things that barely hold a conversation and can’t do arithmetic?” “If you want to buy into it, fine. That’s great. But you can only do so much of that,” he added. Despite h...
Mar 6
User-Generated Content Can Stabilize Digital Economies, Says ‘Snow Crash’ Author
Snow Crash—one of Web3’s most formative texts—predicted a lot, but it didn’t depict the climate of speculation that comes with NFTs today. No character in Neal Stephenson’s novel is shown flipping avatars for a profit like an NFT trader on marketplaces OpenSea or Blur might. Stephenson wasn’t necessarily wrong, however. On the latest episode of Decrypt's gm podcast, Stephen said that he sees an eventual shift away from the pure financialization of digital assets—a fundamental change that is key...
Mar 4
'Snow Crash' Author Neal Stephenson Says Future of the Metaverse Won't Require Goggles
Neal Stephenson coined the word "metaverse" in his seminal 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash. 30 years later, Sotheby's is auctioning off rare items associated with the book, and Stephenson is working on a new layer-1 blockchain company for the metaverse, Lamina1. The company's stated purpose is to help creators build the "open metaverse," the term Stephenson says he uses to differentiate it from the current corporate versions of metaverse. Calling it an "open" metaverse, Stephenson said on the late...
Feb 27
Gamers Will Drive Web3 Adoption: Polygon Labs President Ryan Wyatt
Many crypto builders see video games as the killer app for Web3, citing perceived benefits like ownership of in-game items as NFTs, possible interoperability between games, and the potential to profit from rising token and NFT values. But by and large, gamers aren’t buying it. Prominent NFT gaming efforts by firms like Ubisoft, Square Enix, and GSC Game World have faced backlash from outspoken video game fans. Critics point to shallow gameplay for early NFT games, crypto industry scams, and fal...
Feb 26
Sam Bankman-Fried Did ‘Immeasurable’ Damage to Crypto Industry: Ava Labs CEO
The implosion of FTX last fall dealt crypto a black eye, bruising the nascent industry’s reputation in terms of legitimacy and trust. And this damage is vast, according to Ava Labs CEO and Founder Emin Gün Sirer. “The damage that Sam did is immeasurable,” he said on the latest episode of the gm from Decrypt podcast. “All of that goodwill that we built over many, many years of hard work is just usurped by some guy who comes in and puts on this boy genius act.” Sirer said he’s seen the digital as...
Feb 18
Polygon Labs President Ryan Wyatt: 'The Next Jeff Bezos Will Come From Web3'
Ryan Wyatt has quickly become a prominent figure in the crypto space since joining Polygon Labs early last year—but he’s arguably better known for his past in gaming and esports. Under the gamer tag Fwiz, Wyatt was a fixture in the early Call of Duty esports scene, working as a commentator and later VP of Programming for Major League Gaming. He even co-wrote a bestselling book about the popular esports team OpTic Gaming. He then launched and grew YouTube Gaming from 2014 to 2022 as the company’...
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