Businesses with the alleged potential to become the next Google are plentiful in Bitcoin-land, but finding actual commercial success is a lot harder. The best example of a commercial success is gift card company Gyft that became known as the first place to give access to a wide range of merchants for bitcoin holders and later achieved the largest exit so far in the crypto space in an acquisition by payments company First Data. Gyft CTO joined us to talk about how he got involved in FinTech, what makes gift cards so interesting and how recently Gyft has been trying to reinvent gift cards by using the power of the blockchain. Topics covered in this episode: Giyom’s early involvement in FinTech in the early 2000s His previous projects Bernal Bucks and Credibles that explored gift cards and alternative currencies Why gift cards are a great place for financial innovation The mechanics of gift cards today and why their security is broken How Gyft Block can improve the security of gift cards using the blockchain Why Gyft moved their gift cards off the Bitcoin blockchain onto private blockchains Giyom’s view on the utility of Bitcoin and private blockchains Episode links: Giyom's blog Gyft’s Giyom Lebleu: Following Linux ‘The Most Likely Path for Bitcoin’ [CoinJournal] Future of Money Interview. Part I. On Credibles and owning digital currencies issued by brands you love Gyft Payments giant First Data acquires Gyft in an effort to bring digital gift cards to the masses [Pando] Gift Block Bernal Bucks Credibles This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/104

Among the dividing themes in the Bitcoin space is the idea of public versus private blockchains. While some argue that private and permissioned blockchains can offer better scalability and lower latency for enterprises, others insist the Bitcoin blockchain will offer the best level of security and robustness longterm. Recently, projects have emerged that propose the best of both worlds by leveraging both off-chain and on-chain transactions. This is the idea behind Openchain, an “open source distributed ledger technology, suited for organizations wishing to issue and manage digital assets in a robust, secure and scalable way.” Openchain uses a client-server model where there is only one authoritative validating node. Read-only observer nodes keep the central node honest by auditing transactions in real time. About every 10 minutes, a copy of the Ledger, and its transactions, is hashed and inserted into a Bitcoin transaction so that it can be fossilised in the blockchain. We’re joined by Flavien Charlon, the one-man operation behind Predictious, Coinprism, the Open Transactions Protocol and now Openchain. We talk about this fascinating new software, which aims to offer enterprises a digital ledger protocol that is highly scalable while enjoying the benefits of the Bitcoin blockchain for immutability. Topics covered in this episode: Flavien gives an update on Coinprism and his other projects The Openchain protocol and what it’s trying to achieve The technical architecture of Openchain and the client-server model it implements How Openchain uses the Bitcoin blockchain to “anchor” transactions into every block Openchain’s consensus model The ability for Openchain to interoperate with other ledgers and blockchains Flavien’s thoughts on what the ecosystem might look like in 10 years Episode links: Openchain Openchain Docs This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/102