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My guest on today’s podcast is Evan Varsamis, the Founder and CEO of Mintify, a comprehensive suite of digital assets for traders, collectors and enthusiasts in the NFT scene.  Evan shares his entrepreneurial background with us and explains what determined his decision to build Mintify and what the future holds for them.

My guest on today’s podcast is Justin Rezvani, Founder and CEO of Zion, a decentralized, open-source, utility-based social media protocol that is built on top of Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, with the mission to defeat censorship. I first heard Justin on What Bitcoin Did, by Peter McCormack. Like many other Bitcoiners, Justin is not as interested in NFTs or Ethereum in general. We’ve had an interesting conversation and a little debate there as well, which is always fun. I hope you enjoy it too.

My guest on today’s podcast is Jimmy Song, Bitcoin Developer, Educator and Entrepreneur and one of the most popular personalities in the bitcoin community. I had listened to Jimmy on many podcasts and I knew that he was really against the rest of the crypto space, including Ethereum, and the whole concept of Web3. Naturally, I really wanted to talk to him as there is nothing better than being able to have a dialogue with people who hold different views from yours. I have to say that this was a tough conversation because Jimmy and I disagree on a lot of things. I see Blockchain technology as interesting and revolutionary in itself with application to many other things beyond bitcoin. Jimmy not only disagrees with me, but he also tends to be rather hostile towards everything Web3 to a point that he calls the whole space a scam and immoral.  I’m grateful to Jimmy for sharing his time and insights with me even though our perspectives deeply differ. 

My guest on today’s podcast is Aliana Percival, the Founder and CEO of Women Who Code, a global nonprofit dedicated to inspiring women to excel in technology careers.  She’s built this organisation from the ground up to 300 thousand members at this point. She’s a super impressive and inspiring woman and I’m so pleased that I got a chance to speak with her.  In this interview, we cover Alaina’s story about her personal journey getting into coding as well as the technology space being the biggest opportunity for professional women to succeed.   

My guest on today’s podcast is Lane Rettig, a former Ethereum Core Developer and now a Core Developer for Spacemesh.  I have previously had Tim Beiko on my podcast who runs the core protocol meetings for Ethereum. So I wanted to have the perspective of someone who has now left Ethereum too.  As someone heavily invested in the Web3 and NFT space and the Ethereum ecosystem, I’m always interested in hearing other viewpoints to make sure I’m not living in an echo chamber and I share these conversations with you you can also listen and decide for yourself. 

My guest on today’s show is Avery Akkineni, President of Vayner3. Avery works alongside Gary Vaynerchuk on all things NFTs, Web 3 and immersive digital experiences.  Some of you may know that I produced and directed a documentary called The Millennial Disruption in 2017-18 that featured Gary and it went on to win several international awards. At the end of that documentary, I mentioned to brands and entrepreneurs that if they couldn’t come to terms with Social Media at the time, they have little chance of succeeding when Blockchain technology arrives. Well, that technology is here now and Gary Vaynerchuk and his team are always ahead of the curve and succeeding in the NFT space. Avery shares some excellent insights with us in this interview on the future of NFTs and Web3’s mainstream adoption.

My guest on today’s podcast is Duncan Cock Foster, Co-Founder of Nifty Gateway, one of the leading marketplaces for digital art and collectables. Nifty Gateway was founded in 2018 and within less than a year it was acquired by Gemini.  In this interview, Duncan explains some of the fantastic initiatives they are developing at Nifty Gateway, in particular their publisher collaboration program which can also be a great career opportunity in Web3. 

Hume is a Web3 label focused on developing virtual artists, what we call metastars. Hume has developed the first Web3 metastar Angelbaby. Hume is backed by notable investors including gmoney, Collab Currency, Delphi Digital, Sfermion, Distributed Global and others.  Jay Stolar is the Co-Founder and Chief Artist Officer at Hume. He is a songwriter and producer who has written for Aloe Blac, Selena Gomez, G-Eazy, Demi Lovato and others. He has also written music for Epic Games, Riot Games, the NFL and the Olympics amongst others. David Beiner is the Co-Founder and CEO at Hume. His background is in media strategy working with companies like Comcast/NBC and MGM. In 2017 he went down the Ethereum rabbit hole and never looked backed.

My guest on today’s podcast is Sebastián Brocher, an artist, entrepreneur, engineer, and Founder at StudioUno, CryptoArte, and ChimiChurri. I met Sebastián on the PROOF Collective discord and when we started to talk about generative art I decided to invite him on the podcast and introduce him to my audience.  I really enjoyed this conversation and can truly say that I learned a lot about generative art from an artist’s viewpoint rather than a business viewpoint.

Krish Jagirda is the Co-Founder of Internet Game. In this super interesting Web3 gaming initiative, players can have fun playing, while also having the possibility of winning prizes like high-value NFTs.  I discovered Krish through Gmoney’s team since Gmoney will be hosting their game in the coming season and he has invested in their company. So I was curious to learn more about the concept and their business model. 

My guest on today’s show is Jean-Paul Faraj, Head of Community and Partnerships at Unstoppable Games, an ecosystem that allows players to generate real-world value while enjoying the experience of gaming.  Now the interesting thing about this interview is that, as shocking as it may sound, I’ve never played video games in my life. And yet I have some philosophical views on gaming and what it means for the future of Web3 and this new era of emerging technologies that we are entering.  This was a pretty fascinating conversation that I think you will enjoy whether you like gaming or not.   

My guest on today’s podcast is Olivier Briggs from the GET Protocol, an innovative company that aims to solve the problem of ticket fraud and scalping using blockchain technology. In this episode, you will learn about smart tickets and how they can revolutionise the way tickets get into the hands of fans and benefit the artists and performers while minimising the need for intermediaries. 

My guest on today’s episode is Kevin Thrams, who works as a Product Manager at Prysm.xyz, a super interesting tech start-up that allows people to buy NFTs together as a group. This is a fantastic way for friends and family or even random investors to come together to purchase valuable NFTs. It makes it possible for them to mitigate the risk of buying these assets alone, while still having exposure to them.  This was a fun and insightful conversation, covering everything from shared ownership basics to rules and regulations, to cultural implications.   Sponsor of this episode👉 https://www.metabrewsociety.com/

My guest on today’s podcast is Ryan Carson, former COO of PROOF Collective and someone who has been deeply involved in the WEB3 space from the early days before creating his own NFT Venture Fund, 121G.  I first learned about Ryan when I won the raffle to mint a Moonbird. He was active in the Moonbirds' Discord and Twitter and came into the ladybirds' channel and spoke to us. He was very attentive, kind and well-spoken. Later when he left PROOF to start his own venture I noticed that he was under a lot of scrutiny from the NFT community.  People seem to analyse Ryan’s every move and put, in my opinion, disproportionate weight on whatever he does and says. So I wanted to talk to him myself and get to know him better and ask some of the common questions that the community had for him.

My guest on today’s show is Beryl Li, an entrepreneur in the blockchain gaming space and the cofounder of Yield Guild Games. YGG is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that invests in non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which are utilized in virtual worlds and blockchain-based games.  Gaming is an area that I know very little about but as we enter the Metaverse, it’s becoming ever more important and I especially want to better understand how blockchain and decentralization will play a role in its future evolution.   Sponsors of this episode:  👉  https://www.metabrewsociety.com/ 👉  https://athleticgreens.com/somi

My guest on today’s podcast is Gmoney, an NFT thought-leader, entrepreneur and the founder of Admit One who is innovating in the lifestyle and luxury space for the Crypto-native audience. This is Gmoney’s second time on the show, this time giving us more details about the recent announcement of his new brand, 9dcc. 

My guest on today’s podcast is Debbie Soon, Co-Founder of HUG, a Web3 company she is building together with Randi Zuckerberg.  HUG has an exciting business model comprising an accelerator for NFT projects and now an NFT review platform. This was such a refreshing conversation and it felt like a mini course in all things Web3. 

My guest on today’s podcast is Dmitry Buterin, the father of Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder and creator. Dmitry and I have a lot in common as immigrants. Like myself, Dmitry grew up in a dictatorship. For people like us, decentralisation really makes sense and it becomes super clear why we need it. It was really fun talking to someone who has had a role to play in bringing one of the geniuses of our time into existence and has a front-row to all things Ethereum.   Sponsors of this episode:  👉  https://www.metabrewsociety.com/ 👉  https://athleticgreens.com/somi 

Evin McMullen is the Co-Founder of Disco.xyz, working on building decentralized identity in the metaverse, ensuring that we maintain control of our own data.  In today’s episode of the Somi Arian podcast, Evin takes us deeper into Disco.xyz and the importance of verifiable credentials (VCs) in the Web3 era. 

My guest on today’s podcast is Karl Floersch, one of my favourite people in the Ethereum community. I first heard him on the Bankless Podcast and I was really touched by his optimistic outlook on technology as a whole and on Blockchain and Ethereum in particular. It’s no wonder he is now the Chief Technology Officer at Optimism, an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution.  We talked about tokenisation's cultural and socioeconomic impacts and the many new challenges and opportunities that come with it.  I really enjoyed this conversation with Karl Floersch and I hope you do too.   Sponsor of this episode👉 https://www.metabrewsociety.com/