The Defiant – DeFi Podcast
The Defiant Podcast delivers insightful discussions on decentralized finance, featuring interviews with DeFi's top innovators and analysis of the latest trends shaping the financial blockchain landscapethedefiant.io.
The $300M DeFi Bailout: Heroic or Unsustainable?
The episode dissects the $300 million "DeFi United" rescue that patched a massive hack on the Kelp liquid‑restaking protocol, where a North Korean actor forged 116,000 unbacked RSE tokens and left $190 million in bad debt on Aave. Panelists Dean Eigenman, Binjie Pan, and David Phelps debate whether the community‑driven donation model was the best solution, noting its speed and solidarity but warning it’s unsustainable and relies on wealthy bailouts. They explore alternatives such as structuring the rescue as a market‑based loan with interest (e.g., Lido + 1%) to create incentives and reduce reliance on goodwill. The discussion also touches on the broader implications for DeFi risk infrastructure, governance, and the ideological tension between bailouts and crypto’s "don’t trust, verify" ethos.
Omer Goldberg: The DeFi Exploit That Exposed a Bigger Problem
In this episode, Omer Goldberg, founder of Chaos Labs, breaks down the recent USR stablecoin exploit that let a hacker mint $80 million of USR and profit roughly $25 million, while also triggering cascading losses across DeFi protocols like Morpho, Curve, Fluid,...
Rebuilding Global Payments with Stablecoins | Circle & USDC with Nikhil Chandhok
In this episode, Nikhil Chandhok, Circle’s Chief Product & Technology Officer, explains how USDC is evolving from a digital dollar into a global payments network. He covers its role in driving economic inclusion, enabling internet‑scale programmable payments, and supporting emerging...
EP1 - Bitcoin Before Maximalism: The Experiments We Forgot.
In this debut episode, the hosts revisit Bitcoin’s early experimental era (2012‑2014), highlighting projects like Colored Coins, Mastercoin, Counterparty’s NFTs, and the Lightning Network. Guests JR Willett, Matt Luongo, Yoni Assia, Adam Krellenstein, and Elizabeth Stark discuss how these innovations...
Why OG DeFi Failed | Kain Warwick, Founder of Synthetix
In this episode of The Defiant, Kain Warwick—founder of Synthetix and Infinex—dissects why early DeFi projects faltered, pinpointing poor user experience and token distribution as the real bottlenecks rather than decentralization itself. He explains the controversial INX token sale, the...
How Stablecoins Are Rewiring Global Payments | Borderless CPO Alex Garn
In this episode, Borderless CPO Alex Garn explains how stablecoins are moving from DeFi collateral into real‑world cross‑border payments, offering faster settlement, greater transparency, and lower costs—especially in emerging‑market corridors like US‑to‑Latin America. He describes Borderless’ orchestration platform, which uses...
Ethereum’s “HTTP Moment” With Marissa Foster & Yoav Weiss
Camila Russo interviews Ethereum Foundation product lead Marissa Foster and security researcher Yoav Weiss about the Trustless Manifesto and the Ethereum Interop Layer (EIL), highlighting how hidden trust assumptions—especially in RPCs, bridges, and sequencers—threaten Ethereum’s core values as it moves...
Avalanche DeFi: The Journey to Bring Institutions Onchain
In this episode Camila Russo and Ava Labs’ chief strategy officer Luigi D’Onorio DeMeo sit with founders from BENQI, Euler Labs and LFJ to trace Avalanche’s evolution from a $13 billion peak to its current focus on technical upgrades like Octane, Etna...
Why Yat Siu Believes Altcoins Will Surpass Bitcoin
In this episode, Animoca Brands co‑founder Yat Siu argues that altcoins will eventually eclipse Bitcoin by delivering a portable, verifiable reputation layer built on zero‑knowledge proofs, which can power cross‑chain identity and trust in Web3. He outlines Animoca’s upcoming Hong Kong...
The AI CEO Era: Breaking Build Bottlenecks with Vibe Coding | Ahmad Shadid
In this episode, host Vinny interviews former quant trader and Vibe Coding founder Ahmad Shadid about his vision for an AI‑CEO framework that can autonomously govern, fund and scale projects, leveraging a decentralized GPU network and zero‑knowledge proofs. Shadid explains...
ECOSYSTEMS: The Blockchain That Runs on Gossip: Avalanche Episode 1
In this debut of the ECOSYSTEMS podcast, Camila Russo and Ava Labs co‑host Luigi D’Onorio DeMeo break down how Avalanche’s “gossip‑based” probabilistic consensus and stadium‑sampling give sub‑second finality while preserving a large, decentralized validator set. They explain the platform’s inter‑chain messaging...
What Crypto VCs Want Now | Aryan Sheikhalian
In this episode, Aryan Sheikhalian, Research Lead at CMT Digital, explains how crypto is shifting from a speculative asset to essential infrastructure, emphasizing tokenized equities, identity layers, and zero‑knowledge proofs that enable mainstream banking and fintech integration. He highlights the...