QuantLayer Podcast

In this podcast, hosts Vikram Ramakrishnan and Faizaan Shamsi, partners at the software consultancy QuantLayer, talk to investors and builders of the cryptocurrency arena. We discuss how industry participants think about crypto assets, how they uncover fraud in the market, and which technologies will turn the budding, nascent crypto space into the revolutionary powerhouse early market participants had hoped for.

Bringing Traditional Tooling Services to Serverless 02/11/2020

AWS, GCP, and Azure: The Tradeoffs of Serverless Architectures 01/22/2020

Databases and NoSQL: MongoDB’s Approach to Companies with Scaling Data Requirements 12/10/2019

Cloud Computing at the Edge: An Overview of Fastly (FSLY) 11/25/2019

Financial Services APIs and Silvergate Capital 11/18/2019

Chips, Chips, Chips: Canaan Mining, NVIDIA, AMD, ASICs, GPUs, AI and ML chipmakers 11/13/2019

Discussing a Parallel Financial System with Barney Mannerings from Vega Protocol 11/05/2019

Datadog: A Developer Friendly Monitoring and Analytics Product or Ecosystem? 10/29/2019

Content Delivery Networks, DDOS Protection and Bot Fighting: CloudFlare as a Web Performance and Security Company 10/21/2019

How Ron Lichty Manages the Unmanageable: Topics on Software Management, Agile Processes, and Making Software Hum 10/14/2019

Interoperability in Cosmos’s IBC Protocol with Tendermint’s Zaki Manian 10/07/2019

A Tour of Blockstack’s Decentralized Computing Network With Aaron Blankstein 09/30/2019

Building Scalable Derivatives Trading Platforms with Charles Phan of Interdax 09/23/2019

A Tale of New Digital Primitives with Ben DiFrancesco 09/16/2019

A Recap of Blockchain Training Conference 2019 09/09/2019

Dr. Ed Felten and Offchain Labs: Second Layer Solutions for Smart Contracts 09/03/2019

Domain Driven Design, Language and DevOps for Distributed Systems with CircleCI’s Rob Zuber 08/27/2019

Domain Driven Design, Language and DevOps for Distributed Systems with CircleCI’s Rob Zuber We have Rob Zuber, CTO from CircleCI on. A lot of the projects we work on implement CircleCI, so we were super excited to speak to Rob. We talk about his background and how he became part of CircleCI through an acquisition. We also get into one of his favorite topics: language. Particularly the words that are used in projects, and how important they are for workflow. We also discuss “Domain Driven Design,” or the idea that when creating a layer of functionality, to keep it bounded within its domain so other layers don’t creep into it. This was an engineering heavy episode that was a lot of fun. Hope you enjoy this one. But before we get to the conversation, here’s a word from a sponsor, Blockchain Training Conference, that I’m really excited about. What if there was an educational industry conference, where all of the sessions were focused on teaching you something instead of selling you something? There is and it’s Blockchain Training Conference 2019. It’s going to be hosted August 28th to the 30th in Denver, Colorado. BTC2019 offers every attendee the chance to leave certified and confident in their understanding of blockchain technology. Move past the jargon to gain a robust understanding of blockchain and cryptocurrencies with master classes taught by industry luminaries like Andreas M. Antonopoulos, René Pickhardt, Jameson Lopp, Pamela Morgan, and many others. Register today and learn more at . We also have a coupon code for our listeners that you can use to get a 10% discount for the conference: quantlayer10 Go to and hit buy on your ticket, and put in the coupon code quantlayer10 (that’s Q U A N T L A Y E R and the number 10). We are going to be at this conference in August, so reach out if you will be there as well. Would love to meet in meatspace. Topics: Rob's background & early time at CircleCI Other technical problems they had to deal with On his favorite topics: Language Concepts he highlighted on his talked, "Words Matter: Ubiquitous Language and Throughput" Domain Driven Design On developer tools and product development around those tools On his blog: Predictions for 2018 from Rob Zuber, CTO at CircleCI Books: by Eric Evans by Vaughn Vernon by Eric Ries by Erich Gamma Links: CircleCI: Rob’s twitter: Predictions for 2018 from Rob Zuber, CTO at CircleCI: “Words Matter: Ubiquitous Language and Throughput”: What it means to be remote-first vs. remote-friendly - High performing engineering teams: Devops: 10 ways you’re doing devops wrong: /episode/index/show/quantlayer/id/11011040

Opening Up the Black Box of Insurance: Wunderite and Programmatic Data Aggregation 08/19/2019

Opening Up the Black Box of Insurance: Wunderite and Programmatic Data Aggregation On this episode, we have Peter MacDonald and Joe Schnare from Wunderite, an insurance startup based in Boston. This was a really interesting conversation around how they are improving insurance workflows for agencies around the country through programmatic data aggregation. We talk about their backgrounds, get into the details of the black box industry known as insurance, and how they work with customers on product development. I learned a lot from this conversation. Enjoy. But before we get to the conversation, here’s a word from a sponsor, Blockchain Training Conference, that I’m really excited about. What if there was an educational industry conference, where all of the sessions were focused on teaching you something instead of selling you something? There is and it’s Blockchain Training Conference 2019. It’s going to be hosted August 28th to the 30th in Denver, Colorado. BTC2019 offers every attendee the chance to leave certified and confident in their understanding of blockchain technology. Move past the jargon to gain a robust understanding of blockchain and cryptocurrencies with master classes taught by industry luminaries like Andreas M. Antonopoulos, René Pickhardt, Jameson Lopp, Pamela Morgan, and many others. Register today and learn more at . We also have a coupon code for our listeners that you can use to get a 10% discount for the conference: quantlayer10 Go to and hit buy on your ticket, and put in the coupon code quantlayer10 (that’s Q U A N T L A Y E R and the number 10). We are going to be at this conference in August, so reach out if you will be there as well. Would love to meet in meatspace. Topics: Peter and Joe’s background The reason why they are interested in insurance Broad problems overall with the insurance industry that Wunderite is solving Industry verticals that they're focusing on Couple case studies on insurance workflow before Wunderite, and how that changed after On their sales process and how they decide who to reach out to Some big wins they’re happy about and some learning lessons they would have approached differently On regulatory concerns On their business model Are they looking to raising capital What they're looking forward to next Links Wunderite - Wunderite Blog - BNT presentation - /episode/index/show/quantlayer/id/10915885

Andreas M. Antonopoulos and Blockchain Teaching Pedagogy: The CryptoCurrency Certification Consortium and Blockchain Training Conference 08/12/2019

Andreas M. Antonopoulos and Blockchain Teaching Pedagogy: The CryptoCurrency Certification Consortium and Blockchain Training Conference We speak with Andreas Antonopoulos, author of Mastering Bitcoin, The Internet of Money, and Mastering Ethereum, and also board member at the CryptoCurrency Certification Consortium, known as C4. C4 will be hosting the Blockchain Training Conference in Denver, Colorado at the end of August. In this conversation, we learn about the conference, how Andreas thinks about blockchain teaching pedagogy, and the certifications that C4 is offering now: the Certified Bitcoin Professional (or CBP) certification and the CryptoCurrency Security Standard (or CCSS) certification. We learn all about the certifications and what they allow the holder to do. Always a pleasure to talk with Andreas. If you enjoyed this one, please rate and review us on iTunes. It would help us out a lot. Thanks for listening to the episode. But before we get to the conversation, here’s a word from a sponsor, Blockchain Training Conference, that I’m really excited about. What if there was an educational industry conference, where all of the sessions were focused on teaching you something instead of selling you something? There is and it’s Blockchain Training Conference 2019. It’s going to be hosted August 28th to the 30th in Denver, Colorado. BTC2019 offers every attendee the chance to leave certified and confident in their understanding of blockchain technology. Move past the jargon to gain a robust understanding of blockchain and cryptocurrencies with master classes taught by industry luminaries like Andreas M. Antonopoulos, René Pickhardt, Jameson Lopp, Pamela Morgan, and many others. Register today and learn more at blockchaintraining.org. We also have a coupon code for our listeners that you can use to get a 10% discount for the conference: quantlayer10 Go to and hit buy on your ticket, and put in the coupon code quantlayer10. We are going to be at this conference in August, so reach out if you will be there as well. Would love to meet in meatspace. Topics How they decided to do the Blockchain Training conference What a Blockchain Training conference is What are they focusing more on 2019 conference versus 2016 conference How they produce keys Talking about the workshops How they figured out the programming Pedagogical philosphy On certifications Certified Bitcoin Professional CryptoCurrency Security Standard What do the certifications get you Topics they would have liked to see On their long term goals Links Blockchain training conf: Certification Information: Andreas Antonopoulos twitter: Our last Podcast with Andreas: Mastering Bitcoin: The Internet of Money: The Internet of Money Volume 2: Mastering Ethereum: /episode/index/show/quantlayer/id/10859663

Chainweb, Pact, and Hybrid Blockchains with Kadena’s Stuart Popejoy 08/05/2019

Chainweb, Pact, and Hybrid Blockchains with Kadena’s Stuart Popejoy We speak with Stuart Popejoy co-founder from Kadena. This was a really great technical conversation around the hybrid public-private blockchain that Kadena is building with their Chainweb platform and LISP inspired smart contract language Pact. We cover how traditional finance firms incorporate new technologies into their workflow, real world use cases of Kadena, and what’s happening in the Enterprise. We also get into the technical details of Chainweb’s Proof-of-Work consensus system and the importance of writing safe code, which is an underpinning of the Pact language. Topics: What Kadena is His background, genesis story/interest in blockchain Given his experience at JPM, how do large banks approach using new technologies What is the vetting process at a bank like to incorporate a new tech Real world use cases of Kadena How he thinks about keeping things simple, designing a language for non-developers High level overview of Kadena All the key components of Kadena TPS vs. predictable availability Private vs. Public blockchain vs. Hybrid blockchains What are the things that are being built in Enterprise Your decentralized vision / pie in the sky type of thoughts around what things will look like For developers who want to work with Kadena, what steps would your recommend they take Links: GH Repo: Deal w/ USCF: Pact Language Tutorial: REPL: Key features: The EVM Is Fundamentally Unsafe - Kadena - Medium - A word from a sponsor we’re really excited about. What if there was an educational industry conference, where all of the sessions were focused on teaching you something instead of selling you something? There is and it’s Blockchain Training Conference 2019. Hosted August 28-30 in Denver, CO, BTC2019 offers every attendee the chance to leave certified and confident in their understanding of blockchain technology. Move past the jargon to gain a robust understanding of blockchain and cryptocurrencies with master classes taught by industry luminaries like Andreas M. Antonopoulos, René Pickhardt, Jameson Lopp, Pamela Morgan, and many others. Register today and learn more at blockchaintraining.org. /episode/index/show/quantlayer/id/10775804