Short Description

Live from the momentum of Token 2049 Singapore, Hot Topics dives into AWS outages, A16z’s State of Crypto 2025 report, and Nibiru’s new cross-chain Layer 1.

Show Overview

In this packed episode of Hot Topics from The Edge of Show, co-host January Jones and guest co-host Isabel Castro bring fresh insights that reflect the pulse of Web3 following Token 2049 Singapore. Joining them is Unique Divine, builder and co-founder at Nibiru, a high-performance Layer 1 designed for cross-chain DeFi. Together, they break down the AWS outage that shook crypto platforms, revealing how even “decentralized” systems depend heavily on centralized cloud providers. This discussion, framed by the scale and conversations sparked around Token 2049 Singapore, challenges the industry to rethink its infrastructure.

They also dive into A16z’s State of Crypto 2025 Report, highlighting the rise of private blockchains, corporate adoption, and cross-chain tools now powering institutions like JP Morgan, Fidelity, and Visa. The hosts explore whether the future will see infinite blockchain proliferation — and whether such structural growth is sustainable.

Finally, Unique Divine walks listeners through the mission behind Nibiru, why they built their own chain, how cross-chain Bitcoin and EVM liquidity connects through LayerZero, and how sustainable yield and a unified “super app” experience define their approach.

If you’re tracking the biggest narratives shaping Web3 post–Token 2049 Singapore, this episode delivers clarity and real insight straight from the builders.

Key Topics Covered

• AWS Outage & Decentralization Reality at Token 2049 Singapore
  The hosts explain how major crypto platforms went down after an AWS crash, revealing that much of Web3 still depends on centralized cloud giants. While on-chain assets remain secure, infrastructure fragility highlighted at Token 2049 Singapore raises concerns about “dependent decentralization.”
  
  
• A16z’s State of Crypto 2025: Private Chains & Cross-Chain Growth
  A16z’s new report suggests crypto has fully crossed into mainstream territory. The group explores the rise of corporate blockchains, the re-emergence of bridges, and whether the industry is entering an era of infinite chains — a recurring conversation throughout Token 2049 Singapore.
  
  
• Why Institutions Are Building Instead of Joining
  Banks and fintech giants want speed, cost savings, and control of the entire stack. Isabel breaks down what she learned from industry interviews about why institutions may prefer building private chains instead of deploying on Ethereum or Base.
  
  
• Building Nibiru: Why a New Layer 1?
  Unique Divine explains Nibiru’s origin story, starting from the desire to build safer perpetuals and evolving into a fast, parallelized Layer 1 with multi-VM support — technology themes that echoed across Token 2049 Singapore.
  
  
• Sustainable Yield & Cross-Chain Liquidity Integration
  Nibiru prioritizes durable, non-inflationary yields by aggregating real yield sources such as BTC mining yield, ETH staking derivatives, and stablecoin lending. LayerZero integrations bring BTC, ETH, and yield-bearing assets into the ecosystem to create a unified DeFi “super app.”
  
  

Episode Highlights

1. “Even if AWS goes down, the on-chain layer is safe — access breaks, but custody doesn’t.” – Unique Divine
   
   
2. “Web3 isn’t as decentralized as people want to believe, and AWS sponsoring decentralized AGI conferences proved that to me.” – Isabel Castro
   
   
3. “If private blockchains bring millions of users into crypto, that’s a net win — even if it’s not the purest version of decentralization.” – Unique Divine
   
   
4. “Institutions want control of the full tech stack — that’s why owning their own blockchain is appealing.” – Isabel Castro
   
   
5. “The biggest unlock for Nibiru was accessing BTC and yield-bearing assets through LayerZero’s multi-chain stack.” – Unique Divine
   
   

People and Resources Mentioned

• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  
  
• A16z – State of Crypto Report 2025
  
  
• JP Morgan
  
  
• Fidelity
  
  
• Visa
  
  
• Base (Coinbase L2)
  
  
• Ethereum
  
  
• LayerZero Labs
  
  
• CosmWasm
  
  
• Tendermint
  
  
• Nibiru
  
  
• Utopia
  
  
• Beta
  
  

About Our Guest

Unique Divine — Co-Founder, Nibiru Chain

Unique Divine is a core contributor and co-founder at Nibiru, a high-performance Layer 1 blockchain optimized for cross-chain DeFi, perpetuals, and sustainable yield. Originally designed to power faster and safer perpetuals trading, Nibiru has evolved into a parallelized, multi-VM blockchain capable of centralized-exchange-level performance, advanced data indexing, and seamless interoperability. Unique and the Nibiru team integrated the LayerZero stack to unlock BTC, ETH, and yield-bearing assets on-chain, enabling the vision of a unified, high-speed “super app” for DeFi users. His work focuses on sustainable yield, user discoverability, and building core infrastructure that supports long-term, real-world adoption.

Guest Contact Details

Unique Divine — Nibiru

• Website Link: https://nibiru.fi/
  

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Transcript:

January Jones: Welcome to Hot Topics on the Edge of show. I'm January Jones here with my special co-host, Isabel Castro, creator of Utopia and Beta.

Isabel Castro: Good to be here.

January Jones: We also have Unique Divine from Nibiru joining us. Nibiru is a high performance layer one blockchain built for cross-chain DeFi. Great to have you join us today.

Unique Divine: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Isabel Castro: Coming up we'll be talking about the AWS outage that knocked out crypto this week, A16z's state of crypto 2025 report and we'll talk with Unique about Nibiru.

January Jones: This is another production of Edge of Company, a rapidly growing media ecosystem, empowering the pioneers of Web3 technology, culture, and innovation. Let's get into it. So starting off this week, a major Amazon Web Service outage recently disrupted many crypto platforms like MetaMask, Coinbase, Ethereum Layer 2 networks that rely heavily on it, a centralized cloud infrastructure. Despite blockchain's promise of decentralization, these platforms experience significant service interruptions because they do depend on AWS functions for critical things like data retrieval and transaction processing. This incident has sparked some important questions about how decentralized crypto really is if key parts remain centralized. Can we really call these platforms decentralized? Or is this kind of a new kind of piece of decentralization that's dependent, like dependent decentralization for the industry now? Younique, what are your thoughts on this?

Unique Divine: I don't know if it's as bad as it might seem. Essentially, a lot of crypto still runs on the centralized players for cloud compute, AWS and Google Cloud. Really, even if you have a large scale outage, that's going to affect most mainstream products on the internet. I don't think Web3 can hide from that, or at least it's in a stage where it could so far. But and the important thing is like your asset custody and most of your on-chain functionality is still like safe and isn't compromised when you have an outage like that. So it's a I think it makes headlines, but it's not like that concerning, I guess, personally to me.

January Jones: Do you think that it's kind of a misunderstanding about really what the reality is of decentralized exchanges?

Unique Divine: I mean, it does hint at like, their fault tolerance does depend on other cloud providers, but I don't think it means like, you know, assets are at risk, or there's like a security problem through through it happening. So it depends how much of like, purists people are in caring about, like where the nodes actually run from, like if they're on, you know, East and West servers and AWS and Google, or if they're, you know, like, something more or less popular, right, like less easy to topple over. But it's not like it's easy to have an AWS outage either.

January Jones: Yeah, but there's no getting around, you know, using AWS and centralized services, given the scale that we're going with DeFi, right?

Unique Divine: Yeah, I would say so for sure. Yeah.

Isabel Castro: So I kind of first wove up to the fact that Web3 isn't as decentralized as everyone kind of makes it out to be yet. Back in summer, when I went to a decentralized AGI conference and their headline sponsor was AWS, and I was like, oh, OK, this is a bit of a wake up call because I've always been kind of into decentralization. That's one of the main things that I write about. And yeah, I think there are alternative providers being built in the Web3 space that are trying to kind of target our reliance on these big players. They're just not at the scale that is necessary yet. And I think what was, if there's a positive that can come out of the AWS outage, it is that this continued reliance has come into kind of the spotlight, and maybe it will spark even more people kind of building more of these kind of solutions so that we can move into the decentralization space. Going off Unique's point as well, like the back end on blockchain, that, I mean, that's not going to be touched still, even if there is an AWS outage. So at least we know that it's just accessing it is obviously going to be an issue if You've got AWS outages and stuff like that happening.

January Jones: Well, speaking with the general topic of what's been going on this year, 2025 moving along quite fast, A16Z just released a new report this week called the State of Crypto 2025. Overall, it confirms what we've been talking about on the weekly news cycle here on the Edge of Show. Crypto has moved from niche to mainstream is the major headline. So let's highlight two themes from the report, the rise of corporate and private blockchains and cross-chain solutions. This year we've seen big financial names like JP Morgan, Fidelity and Visa building private blockchain and stablecoin platforms that are becoming core parts of the financial system now when they once were just experiments. At the same time, bridges and cross-chain tools have opened up new frontiers where major barriers were in place even just a year ago. So reading through this report, my initial thought was, wow, is there going to be an infinite amount of blockchain coming our way and all these cross-chain solutions? And it really might change how the industry is going to think of digital infrastructure. Is there room for everybody? Is there infinite growth in this space? So Unique, what do you think about this as a founder? participating in this with the blockchain yourself.

Unique Divine: Although it doesn't look as much like as close to the ethos of Web3 to see like private blockchain specific to businesses. The huge thing there is that it's getting people well one is it's bringing in more like millions of users and you know Web3 has had more of an issue with like being mainstream than being decentralized. I would say for like you know since coming out of its infancy and if you know, if basically business specific blockchains are one avenue to unlock, you know, people using crypto regularly, then it's it's a really healthy sign just in general. So a lot of that stuff of I mean, even when you saw like the rollout of Coinbase wanting to do base and then many other, you know, similar platforms like centralized exchanges announcing or launching them or banks. Okay, it's like, sure, a lot of the champions of like the beginning of crypto would like not want institutions doing that. But the the fact of the matter is, it's, um, if that's going to bring tons of liquidity and usage, and just mainstream adoption, I think those are all like, really good things to be seeing happen in the industry.

January Jones: Isabelle, what are your thoughts on this? You you said you've been writing about this as well.

Isabel Castro: Yeah, I've actually just finished an article looking at the whole question of whether it's worth building a new blockchain for kind of financial institutions and kind of like traditional finance fintechs. Is it worth building your own blockchain or going on the existing ones like space or Ethereum or something like that. And I found that talking to people, it seems to come down to what people, what these institutions actually want to gain from this. Obviously, there's the benefits of kind of faster and cheaper kind of cross-border transactions that's been kind of looked at for a while now in the space. But then there's this whole idea of owning the full technology stack and moving away from kind of the traditional payment rails, which we saw with, well, I haven't talked directly to Stripe, but kind of people speculated that's kind of what they were looking to gain. And they managed to do it with their own private blockchain. their own blockchain because they already have the influence and they already have kind of the user base and the user base doesn't really care what blockchain or anything like that that they're going to use. They just put the blockchain, they've said that it's kind of like cheaper or faster or whatever and their users are happy with that. They can choose to use that or they can choose to use like traditional rails and That's all cool. So I think it's in institutions interest to kind of embrace blockchain, whether they build their own blockchain or not is a question that only they can determine. And yeah, I think the fact that they're embracing blockchain and crypto in general is I hate to, I'm in two minds because I like on some levels, I don't like institutions coming into kind of Web3, but on the level of kind of it gives the space recognition that it isn't just a scammy place to be. I think that's great. That's always going to be good.

January Jones: Did you get an idea of the scale of cost of what does it take to build your own blockchain?

Isabel Castro: I mean, so I was looking specifically at, well, initially I was looking at kind of blockchains that have been launched to launch native stablecoins on these blockchains, right? So the people that I talked to, they were kind of into minds about the cost and whether it really depends on kind of what you're using it for. Just using it just to launch a stablecoin maybe isn't the right way to go because you're not going to get that much upside and there might be a lot of friction to use that instead of kind of USDC on Ethereum or something like that, something very mainstream. It does have benefits in terms of if you've got your own blockchain, then USDC can take a while to kind of launch on there and it can be expensive. So they said something about that. Yeah, in terms of cost, it really depends on the project, honestly, and whether they can justify it. It's like any other product, really. Can you justify it with the amount of kind of users that are going to come in? Because a lot of the fees that they're going to gain from it is through transaction fees. So they need kind of users on their blockchain if that's going to be their main revenue stream.

January Jones: Well, Younique, you obviously have perspective on this. Tell us a little bit about your experience putting up your blockchain.

Unique Divine: Yeah, if you're talking about in terms of like time and just effort costs, I mean, it's, you know, as Isabelle says, it's it's essentially just comes down to like, does it make sense for your use case, right? Like if you, you don't have any need for changing anything about like the actual, like gas rules or the level infrastructure, or it can basically operate the same as another chain. But then the cost for that has gone down substantially, right? Like you can just deploy a new EVM chain with like OP stack or some other, you know, technology set up like pretty easily nowadays. But it really just comes down to if you do want to change something, or if you don't want other people's transactions on the ledger is why you would go kind of like the make another one or go the private route. Or like you touched on, if you're Stripe or you have a massive user base already where the flexibility benefits outweigh the benefits of network effects from using another chain like Ethereum, that's really what it comes down to. So basically, I would say all of the chains now, it's a you know if they're if they're made in in with like a legit objective should usually should be changing something about the the like tech stack on the chain it to justify why they're there more so than just like making a chain to make a chain

January Jones: The other trend that was highlighted in that report that I wanted to talk about that seems quite relatable to your project is this cross chain, these bridges that have happened over the last year, and it's been letting a lot of the Bitcoin liquidity come into the system through various paths. So maybe we can talk about those two things in terms of your project.

Unique Divine: I know that the biggest thing, probably biggest unlock for us in terms of Bitcoin liquidity like you're touching on is connecting with like the layer zero stack. So layer zero works on like most EVM chains and then also Solana, I think. And so for us, the biggest unlock there was accessing Coinbase wrapped BTC, and then also yield bearing versions of other tokens that otherwise wouldn't be able to access a new L1. So we started with building everything in Rust and Wasm, in the CosmWasm ecosystem in Tendermint, and then added EVM support as an additive upgrade to the chain. And then, you know, basically connecting to a multi-chain layer zero stack was like pretty big to being able to have inflows with like ETH and BTC and just like other yield bearing tokens that wouldn't be able to make their way into the ecosystem, which is useful. Like in my case, for New Bureau, we're trying to build, you know, basically like this super app with lots of access to yield and then like the native perp stacks that has all these like nice functionality and then the chain moves really fast right it's kind of if I had to sum it up very concisely and so yes bridges are important but especially like making sure that people can get in and out of the token representations they use on other chains like from anywhere right regardless of where they started from

January Jones: Yeah, well, let's dig into that a little bit more and tell our audience about what you're doing. So like we were just talking about earlier in the show, why build your own, right? What is the motivation there? How do you see what you guys are doing at Nibiru being the next thing that's happening in this quickly evolving landscape?

Unique Divine: Yeah, a lot of what we started the project for was actually to build basically faster and safer to use like perpetual's decks was like the initial motivation behind it. I mean that it evolved into adding a lot of other you know benefits into the layer one itself like wanting you know doing parallel transaction processing and multi-vm support and like all of this other stuff that's on the website now but a lot of the genesis for it actually yeah so it's to make like a trading app and so the being able to have liquidations performed automatically and without relying on external providers, making sure that the data indexing is very efficient and can scale to support not just normal DEX flow, but something similar in performance to a centralized exchange. That's a lot of the reason we built a chain. So a lot of the journey of the project has basically been bringing that to life.

January Jones: And another point that was made when I was doing a little research here is sustainable yield is a focus of the product. Can you go into what that really means for you guys?

Unique Divine: Yeah, basically, in some senses, like the contributors and like people in the L1 Foundation really having a bias toward one like. Like opportunities for people to LP or have other like basically use their crypto in such a way that it's not only just new projects popping up and like inflation where they're generating returns from, but actual, you know, like. yields that is sustainable and that they can keep, right? Basically just so that it's something more sticky and long lasting for the DeFi ecosystem that surfaces on the chain over time. So in that case, what is concrete examples of that? You've probably heard of products where you put Bitcoin toward other miners and try to earn yield on your Bitcoin in Bitcoin, or similar things with ETH over ETH yields, or you put in a stable and then at some percentage, you get back staples, right? So like, like, I know syrup is one of the products that does that with maple, if you're familiar with that in the ecosystem, right? So in some sense, you want to aggregate all of these things for people so that they're very easy to find, like you increase the discoverability, and then make it that it's easy to, you know, deposit and basically access a lot of basically a lot of the tools that are already there and then add some new ones yourself as well, which is a lot of what we're doing on Nibiru. So there's like the in-house products, like I mentioned, like building the perps out, but then also it's making it very easy to access yield opportunities and essentially like compose them on the chain together.

January Jones: Well, if people are interested in learning more, what's the best way to connect with your communities?

Unique Divine: You can find everything through their website, so Nibiru.fi. And, you know, really active on Discord and Telegram for the most part.

January Jones: Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us today.

Isabel Castro: Yeah, thank you, Younique. That wraps up this episode of Hot Topics. We talked about the AWS outage that knocked out crypto, A16z's state of crypto report, and what Nibiru is doing in the new landscape of Layer 1s.

January Jones: I'm January, here with guest co-host Isabel Castro from Utopia and Beta, and our guest, Unique Divine. Stay curious, keep pushing boundaries, and don't forget to subscribe to us on your platform of choice and follow us on socials so you never miss what's next on the Edge of Show.

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