Skip to content

Guest Talk with Jesse Walden | Contract Theory and Protocol Design

Talk Jesse Walden
researcher practitioner
Open resource →

Jesse Walden, founder of Variant and former creator of Mediachain, discusses contract theory and its application to protocol design. Drawing on his experience bridging music, technology, and crypto, Walden explores how smart contracts and tokens enable novel organizational and governance structures distinct from traditional legal contracts and corporate forms.

Related resources

Talk

Guest Talk with Daniel Bashir | A Survey of AI for the Protocol-Minded

Daniel Bashir, a machine learning engineer at AWS and host of the Gradient podcast, surveys the intersection of AI and protocols across multiple levels—from funding to ML engineering to research to regulation. He aims to introduce key technologies, conversations, and debates in AI while identifying current protocols that can be understood through a protocol-mindset lens.

ai-regulation guest-talks information-theory

Daniel Bashir

Talk

Guest Talk with Benjamin Funk | Crypto-Powered Information Games

Benjamin Funk, an analyst at Archetype focused on mechanism design, explores how decentralized systems can leverage information disclosure and concealment to create new economic models through crypto-powered information games. He traces his intellectual journey from exchange design and MEV mitigation to programmable information disclosure, arguing that protocol-level approaches to monetizing and consuming information can solve negative externalities and enable sustainable economic systems.

crypto-powered-information-games guest-talks mechanism-design

Benjamin Funk

Talk

Guest Talk with Kyle Mathews | Designing for Soft Protocols: A Discord Bot Workshop

Kyle Mathews discusses designing soft protocols through a practical Discord bot workshop, building on his background in web architecture evolution from platform-centric systems (Drupal, WordPress) to protocol-centric approaches (Gatsby). The talk explores how decentralized protocol patterns can rethink traditional platform problems like social bookmarking and community organization.

decentralized-data-sources discord-bots guest-talks

Kyle Mathews

Topics

digital-asset-frameworks guest-talks organizational-design protocol-governance protocols smart-contracts technology token-economics