The Main Chain

Zorrik Voldman, CEO of Deepwaters, has a fascinating life story, both in and out of the crypto world. Having migrated from Moldova to the USA at a young age, Zorrik has been a defense comms software engineer, a payments gateway company co-founder, and a commodities day trader, making millions in the process. Zorrik later moved to Hawaii to take up surfing, where he also got invested in crypto investing.

Through his trading experiences, Zorrik learned several tricks that exchanges use to make profits for themselves, sometimes to the detriment of the traders themselves. Zorrik, believing these tricks to be unethical, decided there was space in the market for a more ethical exchange, and so Deepwaters was born. By preventing its own team and systems from being able to read orders before they finish executing, Deepwaters keeps itself from manipulating orders and trades. Via this and other ethical trade execution features, Deepwaters increases trust between itself and its users.

IVC Founding Partner Akio Tanaka sat down with Zorrik to discuss his unique career path, the tricks other exchanges use to profit off investors, what differentiates Deepwaters from those exchanges, and what’s next for the Deepwaters team.

If you’re running a company, you often need to outsource several peripheral functions such as payroll, expenses, and financial reporting, so that you can focus on your core business. DAOs have the exact same needs: realizing the business opportunity for providing these services to DAOs, Kaito Cunningham, CEO of Utopia Labs, and his team built their own tools to help DAOs manage their payroll and expense management needs.

Kaito’s career is nothing short of meteoric. Having operated his first startup during his freshman year of college in 2019, Kaito eventually dropped out of college and moved from Vancouver to San Francisco to work on Utopia Labs in September 2021. By June 2022, Utopia Labs received series A funding of over $23 million, which IVC took part in. But listening to Kaito describe his journey, it’s clear it wasn’t sheer luck that got him where he is today.

Join IVC Founding Partner Akio Tanaka as he sits down with Kaito to discuss how Kaito’s team started their company before they’d ever met in person, how they converted their first clients, why San Francisco is still an ideal place to build great products, and the vision for the future of Utopia Labs.

Alex Migitko, CEO and Co-Founder of Unique Venture Clubs, has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to developing crypto solutions. A developer as well as CEO, Alex has had a hand in several projects that were ahead of their time, including using cryptocurrencies to purchase in-game assets in 2016, biometrics-based user authentication on-chain for MFA in 2018, and now with his latest venture Unique Venture Clubs, automating the creation of companies on-chain.

Alex’s team created their prototype for Unique Venture Clubs at the second Solana Hackathon in early 2021. The prototype enabled groups of people to invest together in purchasing NFTs. After garnering attention and traction, Unique Venture Clubs continued adding features to their platform, which helps on-chain investment clubs create investment logic systems to manage investments, but without investors having to write a single line of code.

And now’s an exciting time for Unique Venture Clubs, as their platform recently launched on Mainnet. IVC Founding Partner Akio Tanaka sat down with Alex to learn about which features are being launched now, and which are coming down the pipe, including allowing on-chain companies to own real-world assets such as real estate.

Alex also discussed growing up in the USSR, dropping out of college to join a gaming company, why Serbia is the ideal place to run a crypto startup, the difference between developing on private/enterprise blockchains and public blockchains, and how the Unique Venture Clubs team determined which blockchains and programming languages to develop with.

It's an exciting time right now in crypto - with decentralized exchanges (DEX) still in their infancy, crypto users are evaluating their potential. As DEXs transactions are completely automated, they can be interacted with in a 100% programmatic fashion. which means they are ripe for applications to be built on top of them. That’s where Semiotic AI comes in.

Dr. Ahmet Ozcan is the CEO of Semiotic AI, which aims to build automated decision-making tools for decentralized markets on the blockchain. The Semiotic team are the brains behind odos.xyz, a web3 application that allows traders to make large token swaps and trades across disparate DEXs, quickly and efficiently. If one DEX doesn’t have the liquidity needed to complete the transaction, Odos will map trades across DEXs, making large trades effortless on the part of an investor. Semiotic has also been in the news lately for their contributions to The Graph, the indexing and query layer of Web3, for which they received a grant of USD $60 million from the Graph Foundation.

Dr. Ozcan chats with host Michael Waitze about how odos works and details its future roadmap. He also discusses why The Graph is important, what it does, and how Semiotic is contributing to The Graph, and to the future of web3, including how their AI solutions simulate how different incentives motivate actors to work either for the good or the detriment of blockchain systems.

Guest Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/asozcan/

Organization Links: https://www.semiotic.ai/

Imbued with an entrepreneurial spirit, Aron Beierschmitt started his first games company at 19 and has been involved in the games industry ever since. Now as Co-Founder & CEO of Laguna Games, Aron is currently working on releasing Crypto Unicorns, an on-chain unicorn pet-collecting and farming game.

Aron explains the process of priming the Crypto Unicorns economy before it even releases, including developing the Crypto Unicorns mini-game Dark Forest that features unicorn-staking.

Aron also expounds on his experiences pivoting from developing traditional games to blockchain-based games, his rationale for choosing Polygon to develop games on, why he believes decentralization is the future of everything we do, and much more.

Guest Links: https://twitter.com/abearschmitt

Organization Links: https://laguna.games/