Crypto Stories: A Primer On Decentralized Exchanges

Alan Curtis of Radar Relay, a Village portfolio company, joins Erik to talk about what Radar Relay is working on and to discuss what is needed to get bring the world into the token economy. Alan explains the four main categories of tokens: utility, security, collectible and currency. He then compares and contrasts centralized and decentralized exchanges for those tokens.Alan gets into what a relay is, why it matters, and what the future of Radar Relay will be. He explains market makers in crypto, why he decided to build on top of 0x and discusses the pros and cons of a business built on another company’s platform. They also discuss what the bottlenecks to widespread adoption of crypto are, what kinds of moats he hopes to build as well as what kinds of moats the incumbents in the traditional finance have.Quotable lines from this episode:“The ethos around blockchain is about self-agency — it’s about efficacy.”“Talent is evenly distributed but opportunity is not.”“For any cool project online there will always be those 1000 true fans, but if you’re not thinking deeply about how this crosses the chasm and how you get your next users, your project is probably going nowhere fast.”“I think most people underestimate the power of brand in the long term and overestimate it in the short term.”“A decentralized exchange is an imprecise term that people have been using as a noun when in fact it is a verb.”“We’re moving a world where the centralized exchanges become fiat brokerages.”-Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Shawn Xu is our researcher, Colin Campbell is our audio engineer, and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.