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In this podcast, hosts Vikram Ramakrishnan and Faizaan Shamsi, partners at the software consultancy QuantLayer, talk to investors and builders of the cryptocurrency arena. We discuss how industry participants think about crypto assets, how they uncover fraud in the market, and which technologies will turn the budding, nascent crypto space into the revolutionary powerhouse early market participants had hoped for.

Sep 3, 2019

Dr. Ed Felten is a professor of Computer Science at Princeton, he’s served as Chief Technologist at the FTC and Deputy CTO at the White House. He’s also the cofounder of Offchain Labs, a Princeton-based startup that’s focusing on 2nd layer smart contract solutions to improve scalability. This was one of our favorite conversations to date. We discuss smart contracts and their current problems. We discuss Arbitrum, Offchain Labs’ solution to the smart contract scaling problem which uses a system of validators to provide a guarantee to smart contract participants. Moreover, we discuss at length how their AnyTrust guarantee works, and why only a single validator is needed to maintain a working system. We also go through how an existing dApp can get ported over to Arbitrum. Finally, we talk high level tech themes: How technology and public policy are becoming more and more interconnected, how technology advising will become more and more important over time, and other technologies he’s really optimistic about. It’s a really packed episode. Enjoy.

Topics:

On the idea of "Bitcoin works in practice, but not in theory"
Smart contracts
Primary problems with smart contracts
Real world applications of smart contracts
What Offchain Labs is doing with smart contracts
Arbitrum & Validators
Porting Existing dApp to Arbitrum
Offchain business model
On blockchain
Academia to Industry
Advisor to Obama Administraion
On his co-authored paper titled, "A Cryptographic Escrow for Treaty Declarations and Step-by-Step Verification"
Optimistic technologies people don't know about

Links:

Coursera course:
- https://www.coursera.org/learn/cryptocurrency
- http://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs27philippe.pdf
Github: https://github.com/OffchainLabs
Whitepaper: https://offchainlabs.com/arbitrum.pdf
Twitter: https://twitter.com/EdFelten
Princeton website: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~felten/