Why Apollo Created Their Onchain Credit Fund | Christine Moy, Carlos Domingo & Tarun Chitra
Gm! This week we're joined by Christine Moy, Carlos Domingo & Tarun Chitra to discuss the launch of crypto largest onchain credit fund. We deep dive into what is private credit, the future of tokenization, onchain vs tradfi risk management, finding product market fit & more. Enjoy!
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Start your day with crypto news, analysis and data from Katherine Ross.
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To learn more about ZKsync, visit http://www.zksync.io
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The first application launching on Zenrock is zenBTC – yield-bearing Bitcoin on Solana. zenBTC will be live in April 2025.
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Timestamps:
(00:00) Intro
(02:02) What Is Private Credit?
(06:32) The ACRED Levered RWA Strategy
(09:29) How To Bring TradFi Onchain?
(20:51) Ads (ZKSync, Zenrock)
(22:30) How Does the Levered RWA Strategy Function?
(32:14) A New Era For Tokenization
(36:32) Ads (ZKSync, Zenrock)
(38:11) Onchain vs TradFi Risk Management
(42:47) How To Avoid Leverage Unwinds
(49:36) Ads (Falcon x,Arweave, Token.com)
(51:50) Finding Product Market Fit
(01:04:57) The Future Of Tokenization
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Disclaimer: Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Santiago, Jason, and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.
Ethereum Gave Away Too Much for Too Long. Will Its Pivot Be Enough? - Ep. 829
After years of underperformance, Ethereum is trying to change course, from scaling the layer 1 to potentially dumping the EVM. In this episode, Tarun Chitra and Max Resnick break down each of these new changes, analyzing the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Is this a reset that can save Ethereum’s market position and price? Or has the protocol given away too much for too long?
They dive into:
Whether the gas limit increase changes everything
What went wrong with Ethereum’s economics and solo staking politics
Max’s view on “the single most important” change Ethereum needs to make
How ETH could claw back value from layer 2s
What Max would do if he ran Ethereum
Whether this pivot is too little, too late
Visit our website for breaking news, analysis, op-eds, articles to learn about crypto, and much more: unchainedcrypto.com
Bitwise https://bitwiseinvestments.com/ciomemo
Tarun Chitra, CEO and Co-Founder of Gauntlet
Max Resnick, Lead economist at Anza
Unchained:
Ethereum Ecosystem Shifts Toward User Focus
Ethereum Developers Vote EOF Out of Fusaka Hard Fork
Vitalik Buterin Proposes Replacing Ethereum Virtual Machine
The Block:
Vitalik and new Ethereum Foundation co-executive directors outline updated board structure, mission
Vitalik Buterin- and StarkWare-backed Kakarot reveals alternative Ethereum ZK stack, targeting real-time STARK proofs on Layer 1 by end of 2025
CoinDesk: Ethereum Could Supercharge Transaction Speed to 2,000 TPS Thanks to Bold New Proposal
Simplifying the L1 by Vitalik Buterin
Timestamps:
👋 0:00 Introduction
🛠️ 2:05 Why Ethereum had to pivot and what triggered the urgency
📈 7:16 Why raising the gas limit could actually be a big deal
💻 9:12 Whether Ethereum devs are too idealistic
⚡ 19:02 How Solana managed to outperform Ethereum at the base layer
👨🏫 24:09 Why Max feels Vitalik’s proposals focus on outdated technology
🔧 27:57 The growing gap between Ethereum research and its execution clients
👍 35:02 The ONE thing Max thinks Ethereum is doing well
⚖️ 40:38 Did “credible neutrality” push Ethereum down the wrong path?
🌀 48:23 Will the new Ethereum R1 rollup succeed?
🔀 52:53 What the new updates mean for layer 2s and their value proposition
📉 1:02:58 Whether ETH is finally due for a price reversal
🎯 1:09:12 Why Ethereum should take a page from Trump’s strategy playbook
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ROLLUP: Trump vs. The Fed | Staked ETH ETF | The First Stage 2 Rollup | Robinhood's Crypto Pivot
This week’s Weekly Rollup covers Trump’s clash with the Fed over interest rates and the surprising crypto moves from Trump Media. Gauntlet’s Tarun Chitra joins us to unpack the latest developments—from OpenSea’s upcoming airdrop to Arbitrum’s permissionless fault proofs—while we debate whether airdrops are truly over. We also dig into Vitalik’s “communist” joke and Dave Portnoy’s memecoin mania. Tune in for all the drama and alpha happening in the second week of February!
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------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES
00:00:00 Start
00:03:33 Trump vs The Fed
http://cnbc.com/2025/02/12/hopes-for-more-fed-rate-cuts-dim-as-powell-notes-hot-cpi-means-were-not-quite-there-yet.html
http://x.com/bennyjohnson/status/1889681567779283447
00:06:25 Tarun Market Takes
00:10:18 ETH Staking ETF
http://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/1889803399320969603
http://x.com/RasterlyRock/status/1889856397032235226
00:15:26 Robinhood Enters The Chat
http://x.com/Tyler_Did_It/status/1889833087258992937
http://x.com/bridge__harris/status/1889904770485461389
http://x.com/0xjaypeg/status/1889805008318906689
00:27:13 Brian Quintenz Nominated to Lead CFTC
http://warpcast.com/brianquintenz/0xbd4cc8ef
http://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1889736851474333932
00:30:08 Is The Airdrop Meta Over?
http://x.com/ffvv1211/status/1889333575348355152?s=46
00:34:21 MegaETH Exploring Alternatives
http://x.com/megaeth_labs/status/1889733671420330150
http://x.com/barnaclebarny/status/1889936153509503193
00:40:38 OpenSea SEA Airdrop
http://x.com/openseafdn/status/1890041091577057522
http://x.com/dfinzer/status/1890039791808376874
00:46:17 Ethereum Shenanigans
http://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1889771554512200166
http://x.com/ameensol/status/1889774627796427235
http://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1889900532770414985
http://x.com/laurashin/status/1890044244750135695
http://x.com/ethereumfndn/status/1889978208986280031
00:52:51 Arbitrum Launched BOLD
http://x.com/ArbitrumDevs/status/1889709836226416805
http://l2beat.com/scaling/projects/arbitrum
00:55:19 JailStool
http://x.com/stoolpresidente/status/1887963615161905566
http://x.com/stoolpresidente/status/1887936281058947391
http://x.com/stoolpresidente/status/1887960660820042168
http://x.com/stoolpresidente/status/1889032422768918834
http://x.com/stoolpresidente/status/1888332104016015781
http://x.com/stoolpresidente/status/1888337834605420917
http://x.com/trustyournuts/status/1888336912844255436
http://x.com/CryptoKaleo/status/1888420272182604043
http://x.com/stoolpresidente/status/1888598919354941897
http://dexscreener.com/solana/etcwbb9ft7yyagpkvz6ag1qzwpjxs79tg2r7tszyup72
01:04:01 Where To Find Tarun
https://x.com/tarunchitra
------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures
In the Recent Crypto Market Meltdown, What Role Did Lido's stETH Play? - Ep. 370
Hasu, strategic advisor to Lido, and Tarun Chitra, founder of Gauntlet, explain everything about staked ETH, aka stETH, how it should be priced, Lido’s market dominance, and much more. Show highlights:
the role of Lido, what stETH is, and what its benefits are
whether Ethereum’s lack of delegated proof of stake contributes to the need for stETH
why stETH is not mispriced and why it doesn’t necessarily have to be worth 1 ETH
the inherent risks associated with stETH
how there was not enough liquidity to handle all the liquidations, especially in automated vaults on, for instance, Instadapp
how automated market makers work and what Curve’s amplification factor is
whether 3AC and Celsius had a significant impact on the stETH/ETH “de-peg”
how does the Merge affect the liquidity of stETH
Hasu’s and Tarun’s level of confidence that the Merge will happen this year and whether it will be a success
what will happen to the price of stETH after the redemptions are enabled
why Lido has achieved such a level of dominance
how Lido decreases the cost of staking and helps improve the security of the Ethereum blockchain
whether there is going to be a “winner take all” in the liquid staking derivatives market
how liquidity fragmentation can cause the system to blow up
why LDO tokenholders might not have the same incentives as ETH tokenholders
what is Lido’s new dual governance model and what is it trying to achieve
whether Lido should self limit its market dominance
how Lido coordinates validators and the role of the LDO token in this coordination
what are the lessons to be learned from the stETH situation
how governance is a liability to DeFi protocols
Thank you to our sponsors!
Crypto.com: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/unconfirmedcardearnfeb2021
Ava Labs: https://www.avax.network/
Oasis: https://oasisprotocol.org/grant-programs?utm_source=unchained&utm_medium=partnership&utm_campaign=podcast-oasis-grants-program
EPISODE LINKS
Hasu:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/hasufl
Uncommon Core Podcast: http://uncommoncore.co/podcast/
Tarun:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/tarunchitra
stETH
Lido’s explanation: https://twitter.com/LidoFinance/status/1535184472546889735?s=20&t=oQeB1uj7HG7Y4he-0gbcLg
Lido’s explanation #2: https://twitter.com/LidoFinance/status/1536756933054676992?s=20&t=oQeB1uj7HG7Y4he-0gbcLg
Hasu’s thread #1: https://twitter.com/hasufl/status/1524717773959700481?s=20&t=oQeB1uj7HG7Y4he-0gbcLg
Hasu’s thread #2: https://twitter.com/hasufl/status/1525427069198508033?s=20&t=oQeB1uj7HG7Y4he-0gbcLg
Tarun’s take: https://twitter.com/tarunchitra/status/1538775828573609985?s=20&t=oQeB1uj7HG7Y4he-0gbcLg
Tarun’s paper: Why Stake when you can borrow: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3629988
Lido
Self-limit?: https://twitter.com/LidoFinance/status/1540258690942615555?s=20&t=sJU5C5xo5litEJrZZDaWNQ
Hasu on Lido’s dual governance proposal: https://twitter.com/hasufl/status/1540652075352313857?s=20&t=sJU5C5xo5litEJrZZDaWNQ
Lido’s two phase voting scheme :https://blog.lido.fi/moving-to-two-phase-voting/
Previous Unchained Coverage on DAO governance: Solend and Bancor Drama: Did These DAOs Violate the Ethos of Crypto?: https://unchainedpodcast.com/solend-and-bancor-drama-did-these-daos-violate-the-ethos-of-crypto-ep-366/
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Gauntlet's Tarun Chitra explains the keys to building a successful DeFi project
Gauntlet Network — a platform that provides risk modeling and performance optimization solutions for DeFi protocols — recently raised $23.8 million for a valuation of $1 billion.
On June 24, 2020, when Gauntlet Network’s CEO Tarun Chitra first came on The Scoop, the total value locked across all DeFi verticals was just over $1.5 billion. Today, less than two years later, that number has grown exponentially to over $211 billion.
In this episode, Chitra describes his company’s rise to unicorn status and explains how a project in DeFi can be successful. In his view, it's not just replicating what exists in centralized finance and putting it on the blockchain:
“The products that do really well in DeFi are not just straight up, ‘take a centralized finance thing, make the closest clone you can, and then try to get people to use it…’ that pretty much never works in DeFi. It's always something that's somewhat adapted to the nuances of crypto systems and how people interact with crypto systems in a way that's very different than traditional finance or even centralized crypto.”
Successful DeFi projects must handle what Chitra describes as the "degen ape," referring to crypto power users. These market participants erratically move large sums of money into decentralized protocols without researching the protocol’s underlying fundamentals.
DeFi protocols with billions in TVL currently rely on Gauntlet’s risk modeling for their operations, including Aave, a lending protocol whose founder and CEO Stani Kulechov recently shared with The Scoop how the protocol’s V3 upgrade is mitigating risk.
In time, Chitra believes increasingly more forms of contracts will fall under the purview of DeFi:
“I don't think DeFi really revolutionizes finance per se. I think it revolutionizes lawyers. You just get rid of lawyers for a lot of transactions… Somehow in DeFi, you're able to make these things like - the tokenization means that you can turn these things that were legal contracts into like exchange tradable assets.”
Episode 32 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Tarun Chitra, Founder and CEO of Gauntlet Network.
Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to podcast@theblockcrypto.com.
This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross River
Fireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.
About Coinbase Prime
Coinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.
About Cross River
Cross River is powering today’s most innovative crypto companies, with banking and payments solutions you can rely on, including fiat on/off ramp solutions. Whether you are a crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, or wallet, Cross River’s API-based, all-in-one platform enables banking as a service, ACH & wire transfers, push-to-card disbursements, real-time payments, and virtual accounts and subledgers. Request your fiat on/off ramp solution now at crossriver.com/crypto.
Tarun Chitra on whether Code is Law | Layer Zero
Tarun Chitra, in addition to being Founder and CEO of Gauntlet, is a gigabrain, polymath type in the Ethereum space. His fluency in mathematics results in a creative, almost artistic approach to a traditionally rigorous and analytical field.
Perhaps related to his search for beauty, Tarun observes the structural changing of massive systems happening in the broader geopolitical ecosystem today. We explore the relationship between regulation and finance in a unique light. Finance itself is fundamentally a legal practice—it’s money plus law.
Finance becomes more elegant with smart contracts, and we muse on the idea that broader governance structures can improve with smart contracts as well. Is code law? Can we generalize capital efficiency?
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Topics Covered:
0:00 Intro
4:30 Tarun Chitra
8:15 New York City & Boom Cities
14:00 Global Crypto
18:00 Leapfrogging the US
27:45 Governance & Regulation
31:55 The Fundamental Crypto Shift
35:53 The Great Re-Shuffling
43:08 What Works vs What Doesn’t
48:07 Core Blockchain Governance
52:40 Scaling with DAOs
1:00:00 Upgrading Financial Law
1:09:00 Code is Law
1:14:05 Tarun’s Approach to Life
1:20:34 Optimism through Beauty
1:26:00 Basins and Sinking to Elegance
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Resources:
Tarun on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/tarunchitra?s=20&t=-Wk1FKVJz6cQrJM6EzusdQ
Gauntlet:
https://twitter.com/gauntletnetwork?s=20&t=-Wk1FKVJz6cQrJM6EzusdQ
Episode with Santi Siri:
https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/-santiago-siri-layer-zero?s=w
Fundamental Theorem of Algebra
https://www.britannica.com/science/fundamental-theorem-of-algebra
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Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.
Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here:
https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures
How The DeFi Ecosystem Grows | Tom Schmidt & Tarun Chitra
On today's episode of Empire, Jason sits with Tom Schmidt of Dragonfly Cap and Tarun Chitra of Gauntlet for a DeFi deep dive. They cover a range of topics, from DAOs and governance, to the digitization of corporations in our increasingly technology-based world. Revisiting familiar subjects like tokenization and Web 2.0 creators coming to Web 3.0.
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Disclaimer: Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Santiago, Jason, and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.
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Empire is brought to you by Blockworks, a financial media brand delivering breaking news and premium insights about digital assets to millions of investors. For more content like this, subscribe to Blockworks' free daily newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter/
Follow me and Santiago on Twitter, @JasonYanowitz and @santiagoroel; let us know what you thought of the show!
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74 - The History of Electronic Markets | Tarun Chitra
Tarun Chitra is co-founder of Gauntlet, a financial modeling platform for crypto. Tarun is a thought leader in the space and is an expert in a variety of topics surrounding DeFi.
This week, we discuss the history of electronic markets, and how we’re in the third wave of this phenomenon.
Get this episode's exclusive debrief! 👀 https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/exclusive-debrief-the-history-of
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Bankless Podcast #74: The History of Electronic Markets Guest: Tarun Chitra
We’re all familiar the image of traders in the pits of the New York Stock Exchange, holding up tickets and shouting out orders to one another. This is the backdrop for Electronic Markets 1.0, when ‘open outcry’ was the norm for the exchange of equities. When internet technology first emerged, it was brought to these markets, such that geographically distinct markets were fused by the instant communication of prices, bids, and offers.
New technologies come quickly to the markets, giving an advantage to those who adopt the fastest. Alongside traders and brokers are the technologists, the quants and computer scientists who leveraged their understanding of networks to revolutionize trading. This first wave of electronic markets lasted until the dawn of personal computers, home internet, and E-trade.
This second wave further revolutionized modern exchanges, distributing public access while consolidating liquidity. Synergistic with the dot-com boom, this explosion of retail investing once again turned exchanges on their heads. Look around now, and observe that we are in a third wave of new technologies applied to markets: Electronic Markets 3.0. Catalyzed first by mobile phones and now DeFi, the markets have once again been uprooted and fundamentally changed.
What does this all mean? Where do we go from here? How do we adjust for scaling complex markets? Well, listening to what Tarun Chitra has to say about it isn’t a bad place to start.
------ Topics Covered:
0:00 Intro 7:00 Tarun Chitra 10:40 A History Lesson on Markets 17:45 Patterns in Electronic Markets 20:55 Electronic Markets 1.0 29:09 Options and Removing Lawyers 1.0 38:08 Experimenting and Crashes 1.0 46:19 New Players & Regulation 1.0 52:19 Electronic Markets 2.0 1:00:08 ETFs and Consolidation 2.0 1:14:26 Before and After 2.0 1:23:00 Removing Lawyers 2.0 1:28:00 Electronic Markets 3.0 1:37:40 Experimenting and Crashes 3.0 1:46:07 Removing Lawyers 3.0 1:52:50 New Risks 3.0 2:00:35 Financial Crisis 3.0 2:09:10 Closing & Disclaimers
------ Resources:
Tarun on Twitter https://twitter.com/tarunchitra?s=20 Gauntlet Network https://gauntlet.network/ Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Job-Americas-Forbidden-Bookshelf-ebook/dp/B013S42VF6 More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite https://www.amazon.com/More-Money-Than-God-Relations/dp/0143119419 When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management https://www.amazon.com/When-Genius-Failed-Long-Term-Management/dp/0375758259
----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.
Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures
A high-frequency trading expert explains why you shouldn't fear how Robinhood makes money
Before Tarun Chitra built out his company, he spent years doing quantitative research and development for places like D.E. Shaw Research and Vatic Labs. Chitra took his experience in machine learning to create and head a simulation platform for crypto networks — Gauntlet — which garnered backing from companies like Coinbase, Distributed Global and Polychain, among others.
Gauntlet provides tools for crypto developers to forecast security risks, possible governance snags and consensus mechanism issues. By forecasting such problems and showing how they could affect assets or network activity, developers can make more informed decisions about security and governance structures.
In this week's episode of The Scoop, Chitra spoke from his experience in the high-frequency trading (HFT) world. Chitra's appearance coincided with growing concerns surrounding the market activity driven by Robinhood traders, as users of the app continue to buy up stocks that other investors have dumped.
Much of the conversation also coincides with the conversation surrounding brokerage and payment for order flow (PFOF), as some critics object to selling order flow to market makers, claiming it creates a conflict of interest. The Block recently uncovered how Robinhood received more than $90 million in PFOF payments during Q1. Chitra discussed the HFT world's view on PFOF and broke down some of the nuance in the transactions on this week's episode.
Chitra also touched on:
Why private exchange trade funds aren't that private
Whether open finance has structural advantages in comparison to legacy market structure
If those possible advantages are enough to drive volumes in the same league as traditional markets
The role of transparency in both the Open Finance and traditional finance ecosystems.
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Not Sure a Cryptoeconomic System Will Work? Gauntlet Can Help - Ep.124
Tarun Chitra, cofounder and CEO of Gauntlet, describes how his company enables crypto teams to run through simulations to see how their design choices will affect the project once it is trading. Using the cofounders' background in quantitative finance and high-frequency trading, Gauntlet uses tools from behavioral economics as well as game theory, plus real-world information such as exchange data to model outcomes after 100,000 blocks. We discuss how it makes its assumptions, how proof of stake differs from proof of work, and how the initial token distribution can affect the eventual concentration of tokens. He also reveals what design choice tends to have the greatest impact, as well as what main factor crypto teams aren't thinking about that they should be. Plus, he talks about his involvement in the launch of Facebook's Libra project, and gives us his thoughts on the design choices Facebook made regarding the consensus algorithm, programming language and the structure of the coin.
See the full show notes on Forbes! http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2019/06/18/how-to-make-cryptoeconomics-work-in-live-trading/
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Episode Links:
Gauntlet: https://gauntlet.network
Tarun Chitra: https://twitter.com/tarunchitra?lang=en
Gauntlet blog posts: https://medium.com/gauntlet-networks?source=logo-23cfbaf25c9a
Unchained episode with Olaf Carlson-Wee of Polychain from Consensus 2019: https://unchainedpodcast.com/to-the-moon-and-back-with-polychains-olaf-carlson-wee/
Zero Knowledge podcast episode with Tarun Chitra: https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/61
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