Investing at the Edge of Crypto Innovation, with Ani Pai (Dragonfly)

Ani Pai is Partner at Dragonfly (https://www.dragonfly.xyz), one of the largest and most successful global crypto-focused venture capital firms, investing across all stages of blockchain and crypto-native companies, protocols and tokens. Ani discusses his journey as an investor, Dragonfly's contrarian and long term approach to investing, the due diligencing framework that continues to deliver winning projects, rate cuts and its impact on investing into 2025, and his view on the current venture capital cycle.

Albert Castellana Lluis is CEO and Founder of GenLayer (https://www.genlayer.io), the world’s first intelligent blockchain, enabling smart contracts to use Large Language Models (LLMs) to access the internet’s knowledge to make complex decisions in a decentralized manner. Albert, a serial entrepreneur, shares about his extensive background building in blockchain, integration of artificial intelligence to developing intelligent smart contracts, and security considerations in this innovative approach.

Ittai Svidler and Jonah Erlich are Co-CEOs and Co-Founders of Den (https://www.onchainden.com), a self-custodial, multi-signature wallet for on-chain organizations managing protocols, DeFi and on-chain operations. The duo share behind the scenes takes on their viral hit project, ConstitutionDAO, and how it led them to the journey of building Den's suite of multi-signature tools that make it easier for crypto projects to move their operations fully on-chain, addressing key coordination challenges.

Ryan Bozarth is CEO and Co-Founder of Dakota (https://www.dakota.xyz) a modern, crypto-native banking platform allowing companies to easily accept and make payments in USD or crypto, operate globally, and generate yield automatically. Ryan shares his journey in crypto, from working as Head of Product at Anchorage, CEO of Coinbase Custody, to founding Dakota – building a stellar team across fintech, traditional finance, and crypto security to deliver modern business banking powered by crypto.

Luca Prosperi is CEO and Co-Founder of M^0 Labs (https://www.m0.org) Backed by Bain Crypto, Pantera Capital, Galaxy Ventures, SCB 10X and others, M^0 democratizes access to money issuance infrastructure, with a decentralized architecture and best-in-class collateral design, allowing institutions to issue fungible cryptodollars. Luca shares his journey from traditional finance to innovating in crypto, the evolution of stablecoin assets, and building an open, decentralized and interoperable money middleware disrupting legacy monetary infrastructure.

David Aronchick is CEO and Co-Founder of Expanso (https://www.expanso.io). Backed by General Catalyst, Hetz Ventures, and Array Ventures, Expanso, simplifies data governance with an architecture that streamlines management and control of data flows without losing functionality, delivering compute over data. David discusses his journey from big tech firms to co-founding Kubeflow at Google, leading innovative startups and now building Expanso, where they are revolutionizing distributed data processing, enabling edge computing to help organizations innovate and scale quickly.

Yitong Zhang is CEO and Co-Founder of Agora (https://www.agora.xyz). Backed by Haun Ventures, Coinbase Ventures and Consensys Ventures, among others, Agora is a cross-chain platform that offers a new standard of on-chain governance for protocols. Yitong discusses how Agora is simplifying on-chain governance and developing tooling for the future state of token-backed voting and collective governance.

Sergey Gorbunov is CEO and Co-Founder of Axelar Network (https://www.axelar.network). Axelar is a programmable interoperability platform that unifies web3 across chains. Sergey joined us to chat about his work building Axelar, solving blockchain interoperability and the security challenges along the way, and insights into shaping the future of open interoperability.

Matt Katz is CEO and Co-Founder of Caldera (http://caldera.xyz). Caldera specializes in building high-performance, customizable, and application-specific layer-two and layer-three blockchains. In this episode, Matt shares his thoughts on the modular blockchain ecosystem, how Caldera is enabling the growth and development of modular blockchains, and the Metalayer: Caldera's innovative interoperability ecosystem.

Fisher Mingchao Yu is Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Babylon Labs (http://babylonchain.io). Babylon is an innovative project designed to improve the security of Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains by enabling Bitcoin holders to earn yield by putting their idle Bitcoins to work to bolster the economic security of Proof-of-Stake (PoS) chains and dApps. In this episode, we chat with Fisher as he breaks down in systematic detail, the unique challenges of building staking infrastructure on the Bitcoin blockchain, Babylon's trustless and decentralized approach to enabling the scaling of bitcoin to secure PoS chains and dApps, and the innovation journey of the protocol.