Hello and welcome back to the Chain Reaction podcast, where we unpack and explain the latest crypto news, drama and trends, breaking it down block by block for the crypto curious.
On this week’s episode, we talked about the virtual land sale that (temporarily) broke the blockchain. Yuga Labs’ now-infamous NFT drop was — to put it lightly — chaotic. Users swarmed the sale like it was a Supreme drop in 2017, overwhelming the entire Ethereum network and resulting in lots of failed transactions and exorbitantly high gas fees. We explained what went wrong and explored some (potential?) conspiracy theories about the fiasco, which seem to spring up anytime a major event happens in the web3 world.
Next, we went through some big news from an OG of the decentralized internet — Wikipedia — that’s decided to reject crypto donations, and talked about the beef between regulators and crypto that heated up this week after a major flex by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Our Guest: Crypto VC and founder Jill Gunter
Jill Gunter occupies a unique spot within the crypto world as both a venture partner at Slow Ventures and co-founder of a new layer-one blockchain project, Espresso Systems (you can learn more about that in Anita’s article here). As a former credit trader at Goldman Sachs, Jill is used to explaining the nuances of crypto to friends and colleagues in the tradfi (traditional finance) world. We were excited to have her on the show to break down some complex concepts in simple, understandable terms, from why popular blockchains don’t maintain user privacy to how new projects should approach developer acquisition.