Building A Universal Sharing Network On Ethereum And A $150M DAO

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In this episode we welcome back Stephan Tual, the COO of Slock.It, a German startup working at the intersection of the Internet of Things and the Ethereum blockchain. Slock.It’s small team also wrote the smart contracts that power ‘The DAO’, a decentralized capital management entity that recently raised north of $160 million for investing into Ethereum based projects. ‘The DAO’ has been featured in many mainstream news outlets, such as New York Times, Wall Street Journal and the Economist.

The interview explores the vision, motivation and challenges behind both ‘The DAO’ and Slock.It. Some of the topics discussed in this episode are:

– Stephan’s background and role as CCO at Ethereum Foundation.
– What is ‘The DAO’ and how it relates to Slock.It.
– DAOlink and the business opportunity of enabling interactions between DAOs and traditional firms.
– Opportunities, assumptions and challenges for ‘The DAO’.
– Vision and products of Slock It – Univeral Sharing Network and the Ethereum computer.

Epicenter Bitcoin is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain, Sébastien Couture & Meher Roy.

Bitcoin is a Cryptocurrency that was released back in 2009 by pseudonymous developer Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority or banks, managing transactions and the issuing of bitcoins is carried out collectively by the network. The network is maintained by the miners that in return get rewarded with the currency. Bitcoin is open-source and its design is public, nobody owns or controls Bitcoin and everyone can take part. Through many of its unique properties, Bitcoin allows exciting uses that could not be covered by any of the older previous payment system like cash, cheque or credit cards.

Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference. In many ways Ethereum is how the internet was supposed to be. Free, open and uncensored. In some aspects it’s design is very similar to Bitcoin. Miners hash blocks of transactions and are rewarded in newly created coins, in this case ether (ETH). On the other hand Ethereum is vastly different. That’s because Ethereum and it’s technology is a decentralized app platform for which money is merely one of the possible applications.