As the second Avalanche summit drew to a close, Sebastien Couture and Sunny Aggarwal sat down with Emin Gün Sirer for a fascinating conversation exploring future innovation narratives in crypto. Longtime friend of Epicenter, Ava Labs' founder and CEO shared his unique insights on the industry, from both a founder, as well as a former academia perspective. Given Avalanche's consensus & architecture, it boasts high TPS and scalability properties, incentivising founders to build better products in the AVAX ecosystem. One of the most controversial narratives is that of LLMs (i.e. ChatGPT) powering smart contract development by bypassing programming languages and even bytecode altogether. The question arises if replacing the human third-party with an AI fixes trust issues or not, but only time will tell which piece of code we can actually consider 'law'. Topics covered in this episode: Emin’s background, from academia to running a multi-billion dollar companyMain takeaways from the 2nd Avalanche summitInnovation narratives in the Avalanche ecosystem. NFTs & blockchain gamingThe Avalanche architecture, consensus & scalabilityAvalanche’s evolutionChatGPT smart contracts & no-code blockchainsAuditing AI & securityInnovation vs. StagnationBitcoin, BTC.b & ordinalsBridging Cosmos with Avalanche: IBC x WarpBest & worst products built by cryptoEpisode links: Emin Gün Sirer on TwitterAvalanche on TwitterAva Labs on TwitterShrapnel on TwitterGunzilla Games on TwitterThis episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/495

The end of 2022 and beginning of 2023 were marked by centralised institutions failing: from CEXes to CeFi itself, contagion spread quickly in over-leveraged and opaque entities. Amidst this chaos, (crypto)people turned their hopes, once again, to DeFi. However, in lack of traditional enforcing mechanisms, not even battle-tested decentralised lending protocols could find a solution to provide under-collateralised loans, aka credit. Mars Protocol, with its unique hub & outposts architecture, aims to answer this need in the Cosmos ecosystem, by deploying on Osmosis and tapping into its deep liquidity. From manual leverage to credit and yield farming, Mars will feature a wide suite of DeFi products. We were joined by Jose Macedo, founder of Delphi Labs, to discuss the history of Delphi Digital, their learnings from incubating projects and the vision behind Mars’ ‘Red Bank’ DeFi products. Topics covered in this episode: Jose’s backgroundDelphi Digital’s historyIncubating projects on Solana and TerraLearning from TerraThe vision behind Mars ProtocolMars’ DeFi suiteDifferent risk parameters and collateralsMars’ module architecture (outposts) in the Cosmos ecosystemHow Mars Protocol differs from OsmosisMars Protocol roadmap & Mars v.2Ecosystem acceleratorEpisode links: Jose Macedo on TwitterDelphi Labs on TwitterDelphi Digital on TwitterMars Protocol on TwitterAstroport on TwitterOsmosis on TwitterThis episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Felix Lutsch. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/493