The idea that in the future tokens will play a crucial role in networks and organizations to incentivize decentralized collaboration and reward contribution is not new. It’s the original decentralized autonomous organization idea that has informed many projects that have been on the podcast (Swarm, Ethereum, Factom, Storj, etc). For Matan, the vision originally led to found decentralized ride-sharing application LaZooz. One year ago, he left LaZooz to found Backfeed, which is building the tools that so far have been missing to make mass collaboration without a central party possible. Topics covered in this episode: How he became interested in blockchains and started the ridesharing application LaZooz Backfeed’s vision for a social operating system for decentralized organizations The role of reputation, proof-of-value and tokens in Backfeed The applications Backfeed is currently building The business of model of Backfeed Episode links: Backfeed website Backfeed: An Introduction for Mere Mortals Matan Field DevCon Talk about Backfeed This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/115

As blockchain technologies mature, new protocol specifications are emerging, which take unique approaches to software design and how consensus is achieved. We have talked about Multchain and OpenChain in the past, but Tendermint promises to be a viable solution for many permissioned blockchain use cases. It’s design is modular, meaning that the application layer (smart contract) and the consensus layer are completely independent. This provides added flexibility and allows for business logic to be written in practically any programming language. In addition, its unique approach to consensus, a round-robin Proof-of-Skate algorithm, is much better suited for permissioned blockchain scenarios than Proof-of-Work. Meher and Sebastien talk to Tendermint co-founders, Jae Kwon, Dustin Byington and Ethan Buchman, about this promising new blockchain protocol and how it is different from other projects we’ve seen so far. Topics covered in this episode: How Tendermint came to be and how it has evolved since its creation Smart contract programming and the Tendermint Socket Protocol (TMSP) How Tendermint makes use of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) Tendermint’s approach to PoS consensus and its scalability benefits Use case for permissioned and public blockchains Future plans and business models Episode links: Tendermint Tendermint for fast settlements Tendermint vs PBFT Tendermint specification This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/113