BlockLayer Podcast
@BlockLayerPods • 114,004 subscribers
Accelerating Web3, documenting the builders. Podcast with top guests on conviction, craft, and scaling. 📧 [email protected]
Videos
“DA layers really differ across three dimensions: performance, programmability, and AI-native design — because on-chain AI can’t operate in a world measured in mere megabytes per second.” Sachi Takahara / 0699.eth catches up with Michael Heinrich (Ø,G), Founder of 0G Labs (Home of Infinite AI), to break down how 0G compares with Celestia, Avail, and EigenDA: why throughput needs to increase by orders of magnitude, how to move beyond the broadcast bottleneck, and why a decentralized storage network is essential for ultra-fast data ingestion and retrieval.
BlockLayer Podcast72,107 Aufrufe • vor 8 Tagen
“After moving from Berlin to Silicon Valley, I found myself bored at a new school — so I started spending time at my dad’s SAP Lab: fast internet, endless reading, and the beginning of my love for technology.” Our host Kenzi / 2569.eth sits down with Michael Heinrich (Ø,G) (0G Labs (Home of Infinite AI)) to trace his origin story — from early curiosity and a growing obsession with tech to his path into Web3, and ultimately, the founding of his company.
BlockLayer Podcast52,306 Aufrufe • vor 8 Tagen
“I mined Bitcoin in 2011, but I completely missed why it was important.” Diksha Arden sits down with Ethan | MyShell, Founder & CEO of MyShell.AI, to unpack why AI and crypto may finally be converging: Ethereum's shift from static ledgers to programmable applications, the infrastructure breakthroughs behind account abstraction and social login, and why years of progress in AI, machine learning, and robotics are now colliding with a crypto ecosystem that may finally be ready for real-world products.
BlockLayer Podcast28,822 Aufrufe • vor 5 Tagen
“Back in 2016–17, crypto felt like a true idea factory — hundreds of experiments, zero gatekeeping, and pure creative energy.” Our host Diksha Arden sits down with Michael Heinrich (Ø,G), Founder of 0G Labs (Home of Infinite AI), to explore one of the most exciting parts of building in Web3: a culture shaped by experimentation first. They also dive into how tokenization creates new ways to fund and sustain projects — including open-source work — beyond the limits of the traditional Web2 business model.
BlockLayer Podcast38,982 Aufrufe • vor 8 Tagen
“High-performance infrastructure only matters if it expands what users can actually do onchain — and makes that experience accessible at scale.” Sachi Takahara / 0699.eth sits down with Jay, Co-Founder of Sei, to examine why parallelized execution is becoming increasingly important for the next generation of onchain applications. From trading and DeFi to high-frequency user activity that simply breaks in low-throughput environments, they discuss how lower fees and greater execution capacity can fundamentally reshape the user experience — especially for smaller participants who are otherwise priced out. They also explore how this plays out in practice through projects like Bancor’s Carbon DeFi, where Sei has emerged as the ecosystem driving the strongest activity and volume, underscoring how performance advantages translate into real adoption.
BlockLayer Podcast105,815 Aufrufe • vor 25 Tagen
“What if a Web3 identity starts less as a brand — and more as a challenge to yourself?” Kenzi / 2569.eth catches up with dcbuilder.eth ⚪️ for a deep dive into the origin of the DC Builder name, pseudonymous identity, and why crypto culture made merit feel more important than background. They break down how the 2021 analyst wave, DeFi Twitter, and the ability to be judged by ideas alone shaped the way DC entered the space — first as a researcher and writer, then as someone who wanted to become a builder. The conversation also explores why “Builder” became a social forcing function, how pseudonyms create contrast and memorability, and why in Web3, what you think and what you build can matter more than who you are offline.
BlockLayer Podcast39,092 Aufrufe • vor 11 Tagen
“Why does Web3 research feel more alive than any other industry?” Diksha Arden joins dcbuilder.eth ⚪️ for a conversation on what makes crypto research so unique: the open debates, the public forums, and the fact that anyone can go from reading an EIP to DMing the people shaping Ethereum’s future. They break down why Web3 research isn’t locked behind institutions or closed rooms — it happens in real time, across threads, forums, chats, and communities where ideas can move fast and still go deep. The conversation dives into how this openness changes the role of a researcher: not just observing the space, but actively entering the flow of proposals, technical debates, and protocol-level thinking before they become mainstream.
BlockLayer Podcast35,193 Aufrufe • vor 11 Tagen
“DA layers really differ across three dimensions: performance, programmability, and AI-native design — because on-chain AI can’t operate in a world measured in mere megabytes per second.” Sachi Takahara / 0699.eth catches up with Michael Heinrich (Ø,G), Founder of 0G Labs (Home of Infinite AI), to break down how 0G compares with Celestia, Avail, and EigenDA: why throughput needs to increase by orders of magnitude, how to move beyond the broadcast bottleneck, and why a decentralized storage network is essential for ultra-fast data ingestion and retrieval.
BlockLayer Podcast76,751 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
“What does it take to build when nobody expects you to win?” Kenzi / 2569.eth speaks with @ruschimanche, Co-Founder of Movement, to trace the story behind Movement Labs — from broke Vanderbilt dorm-room founders with $100 to their name, to building one of the most talked-about teams in crypto. They discuss the underdog mentality that shaped Movement from day one, why competing against polished researchers and established teams created a permanent chip on their shoulder, and how that scrappy internal drive still defines the company today. From go-to-market and ecosystem growth to the fight for attention, liquidity, projects, and blockspace, this episode explores what it means to wake up every day trying to be number one in one of the most competitive markets in Web3.
BlockLayer Podcast41,311 Aufrufe • vor 21 Tagen
“What happens when AI becomes the backbone of the internet?” Diksha Arden sits down with Karan Sirdesai (Karan) , Founder of Mira, to unpack the future where AI doesn’t just give us information, it starts thinking, acting, and making decisions for us. They break down the upside of “infinite hires,” 90% of our cognitive work moving beyond humans, and a productivity shift that could make today’s jobs look outdated. But the same thing that makes AI powerful also makes it dangerous: overreliance, catastrophic mistakes, malicious agents, and a new alpha species humans have never had to coexist with before.
BlockLayer Podcast33,045 Aufrufe • vor 17 Tagen
“Proof of Collaboration = how strong the swarm is. Proof of Contribution = what each agent actually moved, with permanent on-chain audit trails.” Ron Bodkin (Founder, Theoriq) joins sachi.eth to break down trusted performance in Theoriq: actions are committed on-chain as non-repudiable evidence, and evaluators use transparent scoring rules over the full history—while the system stays open for specialized eval agents.
BlockLayer Podcast129,297 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
“What happens when the limitations of today’s rollup architectures become impossible to ignore?” Sachi Takahara / 0699.eth catches up with rushi, Co-Founder of Movement, to break down why current optimistic and validity rollups still struggle with slow withdrawals, fragmented state guarantees, and security bottlenecks — and how a new state-focused architecture aims to solve them. They discuss how economic security and validator-based slashing mechanisms can create near-instant settlement guarantees between rollups, why shared sequencing changes interoperability across L2s, and how native-token staking models could replace traditional fraud-proof assumptions. The conversation also dives deep into the Move language and Move Prover, exploring why formal verification matters, how tiny arithmetic mistakes in Solidity continue to cause massive exploits, and why runtime verification could fundamentally change smart contract security. From integer overflows to real-world attack vectors, they explain how Move was designed to act like an “auditor at runtime” for blockchain applications at scale.
BlockLayer Podcast35,814 Aufrufe • vor 21 Tagen
“Virtual machines are like cities — once they reach critical mass, they become magnets that are incredibly hard to displace.” Diksha Arden catches up with Jay, Co-Founder of Sei, to unpack this idea at a deeper level — why systems with flaws can still dominate simply because that’s where the activity, liquidity, and people already are. From New York and San Francisco to onchain environments like the EVM, they explore how network effects compound over time, why newer ecosystems struggle to pull users away even with better tech, and what it actually takes to break that inertia.
BlockLayer Podcast40,834 Aufrufe • vor 25 Tagen
Allora has now raised $35M in total — but the latest $3M round wasn’t just about capital. Sachi Takahara / 0699.eth speaks with nick about why this round was built around strategic alignment: bringing in AI-forward partners, funds, and individuals who understand where decentralized collective intelligence is heading. The goal isn’t only to grow the team or move faster. It’s to surround AlloraLabs with people who can help shape the next phase of AI coordination.
BlockLayer Podcast49,989 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
“What does it take to build when nobody expects you to win?” Diksha Arden speaks with rushi, Co-Founder of Movement, to trace the story behind Movement Labs — from broke Vanderbilt dorm-room founders with $100 to their name, to building one of the most talked-about teams in crypto. They discuss the underdog mentality that shaped Movement from day one, why competing against polished researchers and established teams created a permanent chip on their shoulder, and how that scrappy internal drive still defines the company today. From go-to-market and ecosystem growth to the fight for attention, liquidity, projects, and blockspace, this episode explores what it means to wake up every day trying to be number one in one of the most competitive markets in Web3.
BlockLayer Podcast29,219 Aufrufe • vor 21 Tagen
AI doesn’t need another isolated model. It needs a network where intelligence can compound. Kenzi / 2569.eth in conversation with nick, Co-Founder of Allora, on breaking AI out of silos, turning fragmented models into collective intelligence, and building the coordination layer that could move AI beyond the control of a few monoliths.
BlockLayer Podcast40,986 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
“Bitcoin was the first distributed systems paper I read with an economic layer built into it — and that changed everything.” Kenzi / 2569.eth catches up with avery.apt 🇺🇸, Co-Founder & CTO of Aptos, to trace his journey from high-performance computing and supercomputers, to scaling data infrastructure at Meta, to discovering Bitcoin and realizing that crypto was distributed systems with incentives natively embedded — the insight that ultimately led him to co-found Aptos Labs.
BlockLayer Podcast45,862 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Sachi Takahara / 0699.eth sits down with David Minarsch ☴, core contributor to OLAS, to break down what it really means to co-own AI. Instead of just using AI, OLAS lets users participate — through tokens, running agents, or even operating them as businesses. From DeFi to prediction markets, agents generate yield, and operators share in the upside. It’s a shift from passive users to active participants in an AI economy. But ownership is only half the story — alignment matters. Through staking contracts, OLAS defines clear KPIs for agents, similar to roles in a workplace. Agents act autonomously, but incentives keep them aligned with the system’s goals. And at the infrastructure level, reliability is handled through decentralized agent architecture — combining multiple models and consensus mechanisms to reduce errors and improve decision-making. The result: AI that isn’t just decentralized — but coordinated, incentivized, and owned by the community.
BlockLayer Podcast38,308 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
In 2017, I stepped into Google Cloud’s CTO Office because I could feel the shift coming. AI wasn’t a feature — it was the next operating layer of the world. Google was leading that wave. Kenzi / 2569.eth in conversation with Ron Bodkin (Founder, Theoriq) about the Google years that sharpened Theoriq’s vision — and the early signals that made the AI trajectory impossible to unsee.
BlockLayer Podcast64,063 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Web3 and AI are both hitting an inflection point at the same time. AI is redefining intelligence, automation, and how people interact with technology. Crypto is building the economic rails for that intelligence to coordinate, transact, and operate in open networks. Diksha Arden in conversation with nick (Co-Founder, Allora) on why the overlap between AI and crypto may become one of the biggest design spaces of the next decade — and why we’ve barely scratched the surface.
BlockLayer Podcast30,897 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat