102: Demystifying NFT Winter and the Future of Blockchain with Tama Churchouse

Web3 with Sam Kamani

This episode of the Web3 with Sam Kamani podcast featuers Tama Churchouse, Chief Operating Officer of Cumberland Labs, an early stage blockchain venture studio backed by DRW and Cumberland.

Tama has been involved in crypto since 2016, coming from over 10 years in structured finance at JP Morgan in Hong Kong. At Cumberland Labs, Tama helps ideate, scope, research, build POCs and launch new crypto businesses from scratch.

Some of their current projects include:

Hashflow - An on-chain asset management platform for structured products and volatility trading. It caters to institutional clients by being fully on-chain yet regulated.

Expand.network - A one-stop API for developers to easily interact with dozens of blockchains through a single API while retaining self-custody. Already has corporate clients.

Digitally - An NFT wiki community to provide clear, objective info on NFT projects. Includes history, functionality, rights etc. There is a lack of reliable NFT info currently, so this aims to be a reliable source.

When discussing the future of NFTs, Tama believes we are in a bear market currently after the 2021 hype cycle. However, NFTs as a technological primitive remain as fascinating as years ago. Stronger projects will emerge from this winter by providing more utility, community and commercial viability.

In DeFi, Tama sees more merging with TradFi coming in the next 6-12 months. This includes bringing traditional assets on-chain while still providing access to DeFi. For example, placing idle stablecoins into structured on-chain products vs putting money in and out of bank accounts.

On stablecoins, Tama believes the structure and market making are most important for maintaining the peg. Non-USD stablecoins are still lacking, which is a missed opportunity - stablecoins are perfect for transferring cross-border value.

When asked about challenges, Tama explained the regulatory limitations on attaching economic features to tokens is frustrating. This restricts the upside and democratizing potential of blockchain. Keeping up with the explosion of new protocols is also difficult. Finding high quality entrepreneurs and ideas early that fit their vision and network is an ongoing effort.

Overall, Tama remains excited about the potential for crypto to enable creation and transfer of economic value in a permissionless way. He wants to enable projects to provide as much value as possible to their users and token holders.

Nothing mentioned in this podcast is investment advice and please do your own research.

Finally, I don’t run ads on my podcast. It would mean a lot if you can leave a review of this podcast on ApplePodcasts or share this podcast with a friend.

Connect with Tama and Cumberland Labs here.

• https://www.cumberlandlabs.co/

• https://cumberland.io/

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/tamachurchouse/

Connect with me here - https://samkamani.com/#linktree

--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/web3podcast/message