Uncommon Core

Listen to conversations between two veterans of the crypto industry: Su Zhu, CEO and CIO of Three Arrows Capital, and Hasu, Strategy lead at Flashbots. Exploring the big ideas in crypto from first principles.

In this episode, Hasu continues the conversation with Danny Ryan and Tim Beiko, two researchers from the Ethereum Foundation. The three are joined by Stephane Gosselin, co-founder of Flashbots, who makes his podcast debut and stands in as Hasu's co-host. 

Together, they discuss:

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Listen to conversations between two veterans of the crypto industry: Su Zhu, CEO and CIO of Three Arrows Capital, and Hasu, Strategy lead at Flashbots. Exploring the big ideas in crypto from first principles.

In this episode, Hasu sits down with two Ethereum Foundation researchers, Danny Ryan and Tim Beiko, to explore Ethereum's upcoming transition to PoS. Topics discussed include:

00:00 Intro and guests 03:02 Proof of Stake since 2017  08:18 PoS - Idea to production  12:24 Why do Blockchains need consensus? PoW & PoS Basics  22:21 Why switch to PoS?  37:03 The Merge - How does it happen?  45:14 The Merge - Unbundling of the Consensus & Execution layer  1:01:45 How do you test for such an important upgrade?  1:09:55 End

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Listen to conversations between two veterans of the crypto industry: Su Zhu, CEO and CIO of Three Arrows Capital, and Hasu, Strategy lead at Flashbots. Exploring the big ideas in crypto from first principles.

In this episode:

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In this episode, I had the opportunity to sit down with Eli Ben-Sasson of Starkware. If you listened to my last episode with Su where we talked about the scaling approaches of different L1s blockchains compared to Ethereum, I argued that L1 blockchains do not scale and that the only way to create true scalability is to perform all of the computation off-chain and only post the results of that computation on-chain. STARKs are a technology that allows huge amounts of computation to be compressed into succinct proofs that anyone can easily verify.

Our goal for this episode was to create the most approachable and comprehensive audio resource on how STARKs work and how they will scale blockchains in the future. We start by explaining inclusive accountability and the true meaning of scalability. Then we dive into STARKs, how proof systems work in general, and where they fit into the context of unbundling blockchains. Next, we use DYDX as a comprehensive case study to learn about the StarkEx system, before diving into StarkNet and its tradeoffs to StarkEx. Finally, we talk about StarkWare’s programming language Cairo and how the different costs of proving, verifying, and storage are going to scale into the future. If you’re a developer, you should also gain a very good idea of the tradeoffs between building on a regular L1 blockchain, the general-purpose StarkNet blockchain, and a StarkEx application-specific chain.

Enjoy!

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro
2:03 Eli’s backstory
5:27 What is computational integrity?
14:22 What are STARKs and how do they work?
29:03 How can validity proofs scale blockchains?
34:13 Looking at DYDX + StarkEx as a case study
56:20 What are the differences between StarkNet and StarkEx?
1:02:46 Cairo
1:13:52 What are the different costs for the end-user?

Listen to conversations between Su Zhu, the CEO and CIO of Three Arrows Capital, and Hasu, an experienced crypto researcher and writer. Together with occasional guests, we explore the transformative nature of trust-minimized currency and financial services.

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In this episode

Listen to conversations between Su Zhu, the CEO and CIO of Three Arrows Capital, and Hasu, an experienced crypto researcher and writer. Together with occasional guests, we explore the transformative nature of trust-minimized currency and financial services.

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With BTC and ETH making new ATHs, new and old investors are asking themselves the same question: How do you value cryptoassets?

Listen to conversations between Su Zhu, the CEO and CIO of Three Arrows Capital, and Hasu, an experienced crypto researcher and writer. Together with occasional guests, we explore the transformative nature of trust-minimized currency and financial services.

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Today, I’m sitting down with Anish Agnihotri, who is a research associate and colleague of mine at Paradigm. Anish has a fascinating backstory from becoming an entrepreneur at a really young age to later going deep into skin trading. We discuss how that skill transfers to NFT trading and how we see the market structure of both primary and secondary markets for NFTs. Finally, Anish shares some actionable advice on how he learns and how to build projects in crypto. This was a deep and fascinating conversation and I hope you’ll enjoy it.

Listen to conversations between Su Zhu, the CEO and CIO of Three Arrows Capital, and Hasu, an experienced crypto researcher and writer. Together with occasional guests, we explore the transformative nature of trust-minimized currency and financial services.

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After a tumultuous month in crypto, Su and I discuss the state of the market and what we see on the horizon. Enjoy!  

Listen to conversations between Su Zhu, the CEO and CIO of Three Arrows Capital, and Hasu, an experienced crypto researcher and writer. Together with occasional guests, we explore the transformative nature of trust-minimized currency and financial services.  

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Crypto commands unusually high yields relative to the traditional financial system, allowing investors to earn 20% on fiat and stablecoins and even more on other assets. In this episode, Su and I unpack a very simple question: Where are these yields coming from?

Topics discussed:

We are super hyped to bring you our conversation with Richard Galvin, one of the best performing VCs of the last years and frontrunner to the DeFi opportunity. In this episode, Richard and Su make the most condensed case for Defi that I've heard to date.

In this episode, we covered

Today, I sat down with Su Zhu, who is the CEO and CIO of Three Arrows Capital, as well as LightCrypto. 

Light is a real crypto OG and one of the largest and most successful prop traders in this space. 

We’ve known each other for two years now and I have tremendous respect for his skill and clarity of thought. He’s usually very secretive, so we are thankful that he has recorded his first-ever interview with us. In this conversation, we go very deep into the process and mindset of trading, as well as Su and Light’s current views on the market and how they are positioned going forward. 

My name is Hasu, and I’m a researcher, investor, and writer.

Today, I’m sitting down with Su Zhu, my co-host and friend, to talk about the state of the crypto market and what he’s seeing on the horizon.

Su is the CEO as well as Chief Investment Officer at Three Arrows Capital, one of the largest trading firms in crypto. 

Just one thing before we dive in, we make no money from this podcast we do want to grow our audience. so please take the time to leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps a lot with discovery. Thank you.

Today, we bring you a special episode. This is actually Part II of an interview I did with Anna Rose of the Zero Knowledge Podcast, and Tarun Chitra of Gauntlet. We explore the rise of governance tokens by looking at Sushiswap as our case study.

Part I has been released on the ZK podcast and you can find the link to it in the show notes. It's not necessary for you to follow along, but it was a great and very lively discussion and I still recommend you listen to it first.

Finally, we recorded this episode the day before Uniswap launched its own token. So keep that in mind when you hear as speculate about its future.

Enjoy!

Today, Su and I talk to Will Price and Trent Elmore of YAM.finance.

YAM launched last month as a mix between Yearn’s fair launch, Ampleforth's supply elasticity, and Compound’s on-chain governance. And while its launch was short-lived (it had to shut down from a bug only two days later), it inspired a whole wave of food coins that tried to replicate its initial success. In this episode, we explore what made YAM so successful and what might be in store for the future.

Today, I brought on Dan Robinson and Georgios Konstantopoulos, who are both research partners at Paradigm. Together, we explore the topic of MEV, or “Miner Extractable Value”.

Blockchains like Ethereum have this dirty little secret that, while in most regards they are very decentralized, the ordering of transactions within a single block is actually completely in the hands of a single miner. They can insert their own transactions, rearrange those of users, or even censor them completely.

MEV describes how much value a miner can extract from users and other miners by using these powers to their advantage.