6 NOV 2019 · In this week's episode we discuss Aragon's potential move to Cosmos, the Libra hearing, China embracing blockchain, and a few other topics.

14 OCT 2019 · The second episode of this - still experimental - weekly format. We cover Devcon5, Libra, the FED, decentralized exchanges and more.

7 OCT 2019 · FOMO is back with an experimental weekly show!

2 NOV 2018 · Today’s show is still mostly about Ethereum, as Devcon is still going on in Prague with plenty of news to talk about. The most important one in my opinion is something that’s flying a little bit under that radar, but it marks a huge milestone. It came from Hoard, a company you might have not heard about. Hoard released a new game yesterday, Plasma Dog, and what makes it very special, is that it’s built on OmiseGO’s Plasma MVP, in fact it is the first live Plasma proof of concept ever created. It runs on the OMG Plasma testnet. MetaMask, a browser extension for Chrome and others has been the most important gateway to using decentralized applications on the Ethereum network. MetaMask has become better and better over the years, but it has frightening issues. The worst issue, by far, was that website could simply ping MetaMask for the associated Ethereum addresses, public keys, so any website could have access to the users’ balance, and transaction history. This was known for some time, and MetaMask is finally fixing it. And lastly, John McAfee announced this 2020 bid for US presidency. The popular billionaire and troll extraordinaire doesn’t actually want to win the office, but he thinks a presidential campaign is the best platform to promote cryptocurrencies.

1 NOV 2018 · We will dedicate this show mostly to Ethereum, as the yearly developer conference, Devcon, is happening in Prague, but before we go there, some good news from Korea. Banking has always been a particular challenge for crypto exchanges. Yesterday, the commissioner of FSC, the Korean equivalent of SEC reaffirmed that as long as cryptocurrency exchanges in the country have adequate AML and KYC systems in place, banks should be able to cater to these companies. So looks like banking problems are gone in Korea. We just wish regulators in other countries would be as sensible as the Korean FSC. With the pop of the ICO bubble, people started to look at Ethereum almost like a scam. And the competition got much stronger, too. Some of the other projects are really good like Stellar or ICON. Long story short, Ethereum, is not in a great shape. But Ethereum is the absolute cornerstone of the ecosystem, 90% of the top 100 market cap coins depend on it, and Devcon is always a great opportunity to inject some enthusiasm into the community. Vitalik gave a long-awaited talk about the scaling efforts. He acknowledged Ethereum today is not what Ethereum was meant to be, the world computer, because of the poor scalability. He also acknowledged that many of the efforts to solve the scalability problems were basically dead ends like super-quadratic sharding. Enter Serenity. Serenity is the new name of the next iteration of Ethereum. It's not a new thing, rather a new name for all the scaling efforts which, as it looks like, are finally pointing to one single direction.

31 OCT 2018 · You know what’s scary? That the ultimate shitcoin is coming from a government. Yesterday, Venezuela finally started selling Petro, the government coin backed by oil reserves. You know you’ve peak stupidity when the world’s most dysfunctional government tries selling you an overpriced Dash fork, which you can buy with Bitcoin, Litecoin, US Dollar, Euros or Renminbi, but strangely enough, not with Venezuelan Bolivares. Don’t fall for it, guys. Coindesk announced that they have raised $300M dollars in a Series E financing round led by Tiger Global, Y Combinator and Andreessen Horowitz. This brings the valuation of the company to $8B dollars, and the round is widely viewed as preparation for an IPO. A lot to unpack here. We dig deep into the numbers. Devcon 4 is starting today in Prague, so expect to see a lot of Ethereum news in the next couple of days. Probably the biggest news of day zero was the reversible ICO announcement by Fabian Vogelsteller.

30 OCT 2018 · Before we talk about the news of the last 24 hours... happy 10th birthday, Bitcoin! I’m not saying you look better than ever, that’s unfortunately not the case, but hey, what goes down, will go up, eventually. Some of our Canadian friends have bigger things to worry about than the current price movement, because their Bitcoin disappeared. The fairy small local exchange, MapleChange, informed the community on Twitter yesterday that due to a bug, a hacker was able to steal all the money held in the exchange wallets, and they have no funds to pay back their customers. Hacks do happen, but this particular one smells. Circumstances, including the timing of the hack, early Sunday morning, and the fact that the founder and CEO deleted all his social media profiles point to an exit scam. If you think $6.3M might actually worth the risk, how about 300k? This is how much money the founder and first CTO of Oyster Protocol stole yesterday. He authored the original smart contract for Oyster, issuing the PRL or Pearl tokens, and apparently he left a back door no one noticed despite the contract having been audited multiple times. One exchange which is definitely not shady is Bitstamp. Yesterday they announced that they’ve been acquired by Nexon, one the biggest game developers in Korea, who also own Korbit, the second largest exchange in the country. Looks like nothing is going to change at Bitstamp, or at least not in the short term.

29 OCT 2018 · Everyone makes mistakes but when you cover Chinese regulations, you have to be a bit more careful than CCN. The site reported that and I'm quoting here: "China’s Merchants are Legally Allowed to Accept Bitcoin and Crypto". But that's totally not what happened and it matters because the market is very sensitive to news coming out from China. So what did happen then? The International Court of Arbitration closed a case where one party refused to transfer crypto to the other party after receiving payment in fiat. The court, which is an arbitration court, so it doesn't make law, it just interprets law, had to decide if existing contract law and general provisions of the civil law do apply in this case. The court did say owning and transferring Bitcoin is not illegal in China, the general civil law provisions should apply, and therefore the contract must be honored. It did not say merchants are legally allowed to accept cryptocurrencies. That's a whole different story, because that is challenging the status of Renminbi, the government fiat currency. BitGo announced the launch of WBTC or wrapped Bitcoin, which is an ERC20 token on the Ethereum blockchain, fully backed by bitcoin. The project will launch in January next year in partnership with Kyber Network and the Republic Protocol. The idea sounds weird at first. Why would you need anything like this? But if you think about it, there are use cases when Bitcoin on Ethereum makes a whole lot of sense. Currently, you cannot use Bitcoin in decentralized applications, because Bitcoin is not very programmable. You can, with some black magic, create smart contracts on Bitcoin, but these are not very... smart. Their functionality is rather limited. Dapps include decentralized exchanges, and you cannot really trade Bitcoin on decentralized exchanges today. With WBTC, you can program Bitcoin like any other ERC20 token. You can write smart contracts for collateralized lending, payments, escrow, et cetera. It sounds weird, and the reaction by the Bitcoin maximalists was not very friendly, as you can imagine, it is actually quite exciting.

26 OCT 2018 · The US stock markets start to look really nasty. Big sell-offs, big red candles, tech stocks bleeding, and the sentiment is turning pretty bearish. Suddenly it seems entirely possible that we are entering the next recession phase, not just in the US - although that might be the catalyst - but more in Asia and especially in the emerging countries. The billion dollar question, of course, is what will happen to crypto? I think crypto will do really bad in a “normal” recession. But if the next recession will bring a currency crisis and high inflation then hedging into crypto suddenly makes a whole lot of sense. The magazine Breakermag published a story yesterday about the sad state of crypto media. The truth is, these deals are pretty much an open secret, although I was surprised by some of the email exchanges published. It was especially disheartening to see that Cointelegraph was a bit too accommodating. Yesterday we talked about the countries “getting it”. Now let’s talk about a place which, surprisingly may I say, doesn’t: Spain. A new law is coming into effect requiring Spanish citizens to declare all cryptocurrency holdings in the hope that this move will raise a further 850 million euros in tax revenue. Hey, Spain! I am sorry I need to break this for you but it will not.

25 OCT 2018 · Tether burned $500M's worth of USDT yesterday, and this is the best possible news. We all know Tether is posing a systemic risk to the ecosystem. The only way to save it is to retire Tether, and the only people who can do this are the very people who created it. And this is exactly what's happening. I told you in yesterday's show that Tether is calling back USDT to a so called Treasury account, where they store Tethers which are out of circulation. I've also said that keep a close eye on this wallet because if the theory is right, they have to start burning some of these tokens, taking them out of circulation for real. And, this is exactly what happened yesterday. Amazing news from Japan as the country shows the world, again, the way forward in crypto. Yesterday, the FSA, the Financial Services Agency which is the equivalent of the SEC has formally approved a cryptocurrency exchange association as a self-regulatory industry body. This is a much better model than government agencies, or God help us, elected representatives meddling with the regulations around crypto. It's just moving too fast... and the Japanese understand this. Another country which gets it is Taiwan. There is new ICO legislation in the pipeline, expected to become law next June. It will make a clear distinction between security tokens, which will need to comply with the existing securities act and utility tokens, which won't be regulated and can be issued freely. This brings some welcome clarity to the field and it's good to see that Taiwan doesn't follow Korea, or even worse, China in curbing the creativity in crypto.