Tag Archive for: interview

Interview: Hack protection and launching on Polygon – De.Fi


It’s no secret that DeFi has struggled since the heyday of 2020. Like a lot of things in crypto, liquidity has fled and prices have collapsed. DeFi has been hit especially hard as the attractive yields that were once available have disappeared – at the same time that rates in traditional finance have rocketed. 

We chatted with Artem Bondarenko, Software Architect at De.Fi, to get his thoughts on what it’s like working in the sector today against this backdrop. Additionally, we talked about hacks and scams in DeFi, a problem which has plagued the bludgeoning sector, and an area in which Bondarekno’s company is working.

Interview with Artem Bondarenko of De.Fi

Invezz (IZ): When DeFi was taking off, yields in the space were extremely high while interest rates in traditional finance were near zero. This has now completely flipped – do you think TVL in DeFi will remain low as long as rates outside of crypto are stout?

Artem Bondarenko (AB): The “DeFi summer” was primarily driven by speculation without solid underlying fundamentals. The initial surge was a short-term effect lacking sustainable foundations.

Considering the current landscape, it is unlikely that the TVL in DeFi will experience substantial growth in the near future, unless there is another bullish market period or significant non-speculative use cases emerge for DeFi. 

These developments could potentially reignite interest and attract a larger pool of participants to the DeFi space.

Scams and hacks within DeFi

The DeFi sector is notorious for hacks, with millions upon millions syphoned across the blockchain as users fall victim to various types of scams and exploits. De.Fi is aiming to reduce these losses, and has recently launched an AntiVirus tool on the Polygon network, the popular Layer-2 for Ethereum.

IZ: Can you explain in simple terms how the AntiVirus tool could protect against crypto exploits and scams?

AB: An antivirus for crypto is responsible for protecting your digital assets (such as cryptocurrency tokens and NFTs) from potential threats such as smart contract exploits and malicious attacks. De.Fi’s Antivirus is a multi-layer security…

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Executive interview: DNS designer Eric Holtzman discusses net security


The domain name system (DNS), which enables any computer on the internet to be identified in a human-readable form, is often regarded as the modern equivalent to the classic phone book. It’s organised as a tree, with the root server and branches – known as top-level nameservers, such as .org, .com and .edu – followed by what are known as authoritative nameservers.

Eric Holtzman, who previously worked as chief scientist at IBM, is the designer of the global DNS registration system used by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and now works as chief strategist at decentralised cyber security network Naoris Protocol.

The success of the DNS system has resulted in the explosion of servers on the internet, and has made it possible for anyone to have a website, which can be accessed if the URL is known or can be found through a web search. This is both powerful and a massive security risk. “The DNS system has fundamentally no security whatsoever, even today,” he says. “If you had even the remotest idea of what you were doing, you could sit in a hotel room on your laptop and take entire countries off the internet.”

There have been initiatives to harden DNS, but there is a lack of motivation to resolve the security issue. Holtzman says that a quarter of a century ago, the people behind the internet agreed on an improved DNS – DNSSec – to carry cryptographic identification information at each node on the DNS tree.

In his experience, company executives simply do not want to spend the extra money needed to fix internet security. “Why would you spend half a billion dollars to improve your security? That’s actually an issue for the regulators,” says Holtzman.

In some places, like the US, he says there is a lack of privacy and understanding of what security means. The fines imposed on companies for data losses are so insignificant that there is little incentive to improve security. For instance, pointing to Equifax, Holtzman says that one in every three Americans were affected by its data breach, yet it received a minimal fine, so the downside of a data breach is trivial.

According to Holtzman, another fundamental problem with the…

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John McAfee: about blockchain, bitcoins and cyber security



Interview – Dov H. Levin


Dov H. Levin is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong. His main current research project is on the causes, effects, and effectiveness of partisan electoral interventions/foreign election interference, a topic on which he has published multiple scholarly articles. His book on this topic, Meddling in the Ballot Box: The Causes and Effects of Partisan Electoral Interventions, was published by Oxford University Press in 2020 and won the Robert Jervis & Paul Schroeder Best Book Award for 2021 from the American Political Science Association.

Where do you see the most exciting debates happening in your field?

There are multiple such debates. However outside of those directly related to my research, I would note two in International Relations. The first is on the effects of leaders on their countries’ foreign policies. For many years the first image (or the individual level of analysis) was neglected or declared unimportant because it was hard to find ways to systematically study leaders. However with the emergence of good databases on leaders’ characteristics this has become more tractable, leading to a renaissance of interesting empirical research on this aspect. The second is on the role of status in country’s foreign policies. References to its potential importance go back to ancient historians, but only in the last 10–15 years have IR scholars begun to systematically explore it and how and when it exactly matters.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

As a result of my research, my view of relations between democracies has significantly darkened over time. Democracies are clearly frequently willing to use various non-violent forms of coercion and other rather unethical methods (in liberal or democratic terms) to get what they want from other democracies. In other words, democracies may be quite unwilling to go to war with each other – but that particular aspect of self-restraint does not seem to extend otherwise to their behaviour towards each other…

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