Passing time with Psilocybe Want some Diem-T? 13.4.2022

Alright, come on in. I give a history of Libra/Diem, and provide a little background to some of the key names. To be honest, I wish to delve into the wider web of the Association, it would have taken months to do thorough on all the people involved. Therefore, at the end there is a list of names with a concise adage. Have a skim and a swim, there is some interesting stuff in here.

Introduction

The Story of Diem So Far…

Mo Shaikh

Aptos

Sam Blackshear

Evan Chang

Mysten Labs

0L

Celestia

Hotstuff

Silvergate

Marc Andreessen

Stuart Levey’s Statement

Some Closing Thoughts

Names | who’s who?

Tech requires nerds and business requires connections. In tech history there is often a small group of nerds that come to together and produce something. They move on to do other things and due to their connections, they can boost one another’s start-ups.

The PayPal Mafia are an example of the Western tech landscape being shaped by a small group of nerdy business fellas who did not like jocks. Here is a well-made interactive map of PayPal connections: https://fleximize.com/paypal-mafia/

The next line is the Ethereum Cartel. If anyone says Ethereum Mafia, they are lazy.

The Ethereum story has a bit more bitterness to the break-up but fundamentally any new project that resides in the crypto-world has to be integral to the fact that Ethereum is the big decentralised, pioneering elephant in the room.

With the previous two examples, they made a product that went public. For the topic today, the product never made it public. It even struggled for public trials. An array of top talent came together and developed high-end tech but in order for this to see the light of day, they have had to leave the association behind and create new projects to shelter the creations.

This is the Diem Diaspora

CUE THE MUSIC

There is a decent article in the Financial Times named, “Facebook Libra: the inside story of how the company’s crypto currency dream died”. It is a nice vanilla read that had to fit a word count and a good starting point. It does seem to cut out a lot and it would leave you to believe this was all David Marcus’s idea. It does not what we know, dear reader, so I have taken the key points, put in key details it seemed to gloss over.

David Marcus, of PayPal fame, resigned from Coinbase board, and at the beginning of this story, he was leading Messenger when he thought of combining Facebook and crypto. Marcus called Zuck up present his idea. In 2018, he left Messenger but was still working for Facebook. Around the same time, some important developers, whom I shall name later, in the blockchain space were recruited as researchers. Ripples were spilling outwards and people were curious.

Morgan Beller was at Andreessen Horowitz then went on to join Facebook’s corporate development team and was a keen blockchain advocate, she was trying her best to convince Facebook to make the use of blockchain and Bitcoin mining. It was an ideal fit then that Marcus teamed up with Beller in 2018 to begin the project at Facebook’s HQ. The projects potential was quickly recognised, the two and their team were put into quarters where access was only given to those who were relevant to the project for Facebook wanted there to be no chance of a leak.

A full story of the origins may arise some day. The FT article leads with David Marcus having the idea but it depends on your source. Other sources say it was Beller leading the torch for blockchain at Facebook and Marcus joined her later on, perhaps after he spoke with Zuckerberg, Mark sent Markus to Morgan.

What I found on in the FT article is that it cuts out Christian Catalini from the story. He is credited as the Co-Creator of Libra and a well-respected mind this crypto-economic space. You don’t have to wade too deep into a Google search to recognise the man has intellectual and professional pedigree, yet that seems to go over the heads at the Financial Times.

In 2013, Catalini co-designed MIT Bitcoin with Catherine Tucker. They gave $100 of Bitcoin to thousands of students, by 2016, on 14% were still actively using it. In the project, there were prizes such as the “Next Billion”, which rewarded innovative applications that focused on the developed world. The next billion meaning the unbanked of the world.

The goal was to explore the capabilities of this new-fangled technology and how it could potentially democratise money. His narrative reads that he grew frustrated with its limitations but he did figure Facebook would be the ideal place to create the technology necessary for his ideas and ambition, due to their engineering talent, reach and funds.

I find it really interesting in his narrative he just jumps to Facebook, he does not mention that there was a short list of say, Apple and Google and others. Michael Cusumano, SMR Distinguished Professor of Management at MIT Sloan, said that Libra was influenced by WeChat but even though WeChat in China offers the combination of sending money in a social media platform, it is not compatible with other payment systems.

WhatsApp plus Payment Systems = WeChat.

That is when it clicked. If you have read Cannon of Insanity, you can appreciate the depth of Breyer, the man who is everywhere, MIT and CIA. Breyer is crucial to Facebook’s story as well as the cloud computing revolution and the tech centre of China. It brings a new meaning behind why Catalini appreciated Facebooks reach, talent pool and funds.

Catalini said that this project will bring a new business model for Facebook, it is not simply a way to show more advertisements.

Cusumano also pointed out, in November 2019, that it was a bad time for Facebook to attempt this due to their serious misuse of data and security of people’s data. How prophetic he was.

The project was to be called Libra. The dream was to launch it on open-source technology. It was to be moved away from Facebook directly and put under the Libra Association, which had Uber, Vodafone, Spotify, Visa and Mastercard as founding members. Facebook would lead the initiative; the founding members would have equal voting as well as put $10mm into the reserve. The association was moved to Switzerland and had 28 companies and non-profits, who would integrate Libra. Not only would it be exposed to Facebooks 2bn users, there is the central payment systems, taxi cost, the top streaming service, and the dominant mobile company, as well as the other partners, giving exposure to the coin.

Payments: PayU, Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, Stripe

Technology/Ecommerce marketplaces: Calibra, Lyft, Spotify, Uber, Farfetch, Ebay, Booking Holdings, Mercado Pago

Non-profit and multilateral organizations, academic institutions: Creative Destruction Lab, Kiva, Mercy Corps, Women’s World Banking.

Telecommunications: Illiad, Vodafone

Crypto/Blockchain: Coinbase, Anchorage (a subsidiary of Andreessen Horowitz), Bison Trails, Xapo

Venture Capital: Andreessen Horowitz, Breakthrough Initiatives, Ribbit Capital, Thrive Capital, Union Square Ventures

There was a lot of optimism. The world was there to be melded to their will. A Libra Bug Programme was being launched. The Whitepaper for Libra was published in June 2019. This brought to life the initiative of the Move language. The founding members were to be the node operators to begin with but over time it would be opened up.

George Danezis, Shehar Bano and Alberto Sonnino began working for Facebook and this caught eagle-eyed observers attention. Danezis is famous for Coconut Protocol and the three of them co-founded Chainspace. Chainspace was a sharded, smart contracts platform, it described itself with having the ability for being able to execute to a planetary scale.  The purchase of Chainspace in February 2019 was seen as Facebook’s debut into blockchain and June 18th, Danezis tweets Libra is going public with their papers on Blockchain, Consensus, Move Language and VM. It has to date received 187 likes.

Mustafa Al-Bassam was the only co-founder of Chainspace to not move over to Libra for he did not believe in the decentralisation of the project, furthermore, even though Facebook may have good intentions he believed it will make things worse – i.e. more centralised.

Al-Bassam makes a point that our current financial system is more decentralised and more censorship resistant than what Libra proposed. Money requires no ledger and is permissionless. People in Iran can use their currency despite the sanctions upon them.

An observation, it is interesting to note how centralised the system is towards mainly Northern Europe. Still, money has to travel through networks and there are strong economic centres outside of Northern Europe. With Libra, it is a corral of $1bn+ valuated companies, largely US based, that make up the members. Furthermore, this Association was under the Swiss Federal Constitution via the Swiss Courts.

At the time of writing, this tweet received 974 likes

Al-Bassam criticised Libra at the time for saying they will have a blockchain of 1000TPS. However, that was the purpose of hire the staff of Chainspace. Their expertise was to help improve upon this. Dave Hrycyszyn, was attained by Libra, he co-authored not just Chainspace but also the leaderless, PBFT-variant consensus protocol Blockmania, the prototype of which turned out to be likely the world’s fastest distributed ledger clocking 400,000 TPS with 2 secs finality. He left after one month of Libra’s company to become Nym’s CTO.

Nym’s credentials build on further from Coconut’s, which was authored by Alberto Sonnino, Mustafa Al-Bassam, Shehar Bano, Sarah Meiklejohn, George Danezis. If I am correct in my reading, Coconut provides privacy on blockchain, which is the Nym Projects goal.

Now, back to the assortment of names that were within Libra, this was an attempt to show a regulated, slow moving industry that Libra had good faith. It was not a centralisation of money by Facebook, it was a democratic move to help bring more people into the system and provide much higher transaction rates to finance.

The aim of these payment projects is to bank the unbank, to bring people into the system. If you pay attention, none of these organisations are from unbanked regions. That is a little bit churlish, needless and snarky of me, after all, who would have a company in an unbanked region? Besides, Kiva is a money lending online platform that targets low-income entrepreneurs and students, which is a magnanimous goal. Straight from Wikipedia, “Since 2005, Kiva has crowd-funded more than 1.6 million loans, totaling over $1.68 billion, with a repayment rate of 96.3 percent.”

I felt a bit of respect for Kiva after reading that last line, then the following line reads, “Despite its size, independent review by GiveWell failed to find evidence that the organization produces significant social benefit, with at least one partner supposedly vetted by Kiva earning high profits while having a very high recipient drop-out rate.” …

If I drop my cynical hat for a second, it is expensive to be poor and the costs of access to education, remittance fees, healthcare, to simply live, can drown even the hardest of workers born into financially deprived circumstance. Therefore, innovations of the internet and cheaper payments systems that can happen due to the wonders of blockchain and DLTs is great and honourable to help alleviate poverty.

If I place my cynical hat back on, when it comes to Libra it feels like virtue-signalling and there are ulterior motives for this. “Facebook and pals are here to make your money better,” it just doesn’t sit right with me.

I did not know until writing this that Tencent owns 9% of Spotify and the biggest individual shareholder of Uber is Yasir Al-Rumayyan, Governor of the Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. If you are interested, Cayman 2 Ltd.SB (Softbank) is the biggest shareholder of Uber with a little over 10%. SoftBank were reported to have $100bn fund for underrepresented founders called the Vision Fund - PIF contributing $45 billion, SoftBank contributing $28 billion, the Mubadala Investment Company contributing $15 billion and the rest from other investors including Apple.

SoftBank is connected with Standard Chartered, Mizuho Bank, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Microsoft, Apple and more. They are a massive conglomerate.

As you can see, the foothold the project would have in infecting, I mean invading, I mean improving the economic system is quite substantial. They have the capital investment to roll it out, the core payment systems ready to employ it; Ebay, Uber and Spotify are sitting on billions in transactions and peer-to-peer interaction. For Facebook, this was great. All that transaction data to play with, to provide to the highest bidders, all that ecommerce it would be exposed to and the percentages on the fees for transactions.

Zuckerberg was on the board of Breakthrough Initiatives along with Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner. BI was started by Yuri and Julian Milner in 2015 to seek evidence of life beyond Earth. Interestingly, Yuri found DST Global. Who are they? An asset company hosting $50bn in assets, they specialise in late-stage internet companies. They are a significant player.

Iliad SA is a French company, which is sweet to know the French were being represented on something of significance for once.

David Marcus sat on the Libra board as well ran a digital wallet for Facebook’s new subsidiary Calibra.

Mid-June 2019, there was a press launch and there something misaligned. Zuck does not get that the world perceives him as a creepy, grey lizard with a haunted bowling-pin head and that Facebook, despite its social media dominance, is not well liked. This press launch announces that Libra in astrology signifies justice and in French Libre means “free.”

Freedom. Justice. Money. With this guy…

Trump tweeted how he did not like crypto and Mnunchin uttered that Facebook had a lot to do in order to make the Feds and Regs comfortable.

Chair of the Fed, Powell, was in favour of green lighting it. Yellen was closer to the POTUS Trump as well as Biden, who both did not like crypto nor Zuck respectively.

July 2019, Marcus went to Congress.

Just think for a second that you are The American Government. Some billionaire nerds make a scheme where their coin, which is regulated in Switzerland and the association has a small cabal of shops and credit cards, is going to run the economy. This coin is not just backed by the USD but other currencies too.

I am surprised congress did not just point and laugh for several days, throwing vegetables and heckling like Statler and Waldorf.

A smart man is Marcus but his charm and sense of goodwill was not going to win against the tide of concern, he thought he could schmooze the Feds, let the devs build and we will all be singing songs together in at the Utopia built by Facebook. Instead, he was united both parties for a day and was berated by both sides of the house. “You think you can just walk in here, with all your data, and your non-blinking eyes and just mess with the money? Well?! DID YA?” not verbatim but it was the general gist of it. Libra was told to be put on hold.

This was a wakeup call. The plan was for cordial talks, which would progress the project, then the members of Libra would get together and step up. Now, Association members were fearing political backlash and accusing Facebook of over promoting them. Poor Facebook, if this went well, it was a group effort, if it didn’t - and it didn’t – it was Facebook’s idea and fault, “they made us do it, we are victims,” cried Mastercard et al. What makes me laugh is Farfetch, a luxury fashions company, put Libra front and centre of their website the moment they joined the Association. Then they cry over promotion.

Snakes.

Paypal never showed up to the meeting and the day after announced they were leaving the Libra Association.

Democrats Brown and Schatz wrote to Mastercard, Visa and Strip with a strongly worded threatening letter – strong currency in Washington, the closest thing to a legal drive-by for politicians - about potential backlash if they did not back away from the project.

Many members pulled out including Ebay, Stripe, Visa and Mastercard. The wind was out of Libra’s sails and a new strategy was needed.

Get in top men. Drafted in was Steve Bunnell, who became Libra’s Chief Legal Officer. He was the former Chief of the Criminal Division at US Attorney’s Office and Justice Department Counsel.  A former Chief of Fraud and Public Corruption Section, he achieved General Counsel of US Department of Homeland Security. Whilst he was at Diem, he was also a member of the Council of Foreign Relations.

An aside, on April 7th 2022, Bunnell is featuring at a NAFUSA conference on a panel titled, “Crypto: the good, the bad, the ugly”.

Who is that parachuting through the ceiling, in May 2020, straight into the Chief Executive chair? That’s Stuart Levey. He is the former Treasury Official in charge of US Government’s efforts to stop terrorist funding. He worked under Bush and Obama, one of the few appointees to work for both Republicans and Democrats. There is an asterisk there however, he only worked for Obama for 10 days.

In Al-Bassam’s tweet, he mentions how German banks were pressured by American banks to not provide funds to Iran. It was Levey who brought in the policy for US corporations to impose government-imposed financial measures.

Stuart had the expertise and resume to show he could combat financial crime and money laundering.

Top guys who are well versed in the regulatory game began making the changes. Libra became Diem. David Marcus focussed on Facebook’s digital wallet Novi, meanwhile Morgan Beller left early 2020 for venture capital firm NFX. NFX, along with Balaji Srinivasan and Galaxy**,** have invested in Radicle.XYZ, a fully decentralized code repository. Ramp.network is another  She still held a loose advisory role but her heart was elsewhere. In her own words, “I guess I really love the zero-to-one phases of projects. And with Diem and Novi, we were way past that point.”

Kevin Weil left as well as Simon Morris. Weil is an odd one, he can be found as a co-creator of Libra/Diem but not much is said on his influence. He left for Planet Labs. Morris is currently CSO at ConsenSys.

By June 2020, Catalini was made Chief Economist of the association – to this day, he still is, according to his Linked In, and, what I seem to be relevant, he is a member of the CBDC Engagement Forum at the Bank of England since September 2021.

Levey shrunk the project. Initially, Libra would be backed by a treasury consisting of multiple currencies and safe assets. Diem was to be backed 1-to-1 with the USD. Engineers worked hard to build a system that would track signs of money laundering or sanction breaking as well as devised a way to stop anonymous transactions. From the early days, Catalini spoke of how AI and Machine Learning was applied to aid the Anti-Money laundering technology. This required a great deal of reverse engineering.

As the pandemic hit, meetings with officials were over Zoom and the tedium of combing over precise wording in compliance went on and on. Some agencies did not know of other agencies. However, there was some hope.

Spring 2021 and Catalini was trying to appease Central Banks by saying that CBDCs will replace Diem eventually. He held a presentation saying the association will continue to be a member-run organization with equal voting rights, with no single member maintaining control. Revenue will be made through "very small" transaction fees on basic payments, but in the long run, Catalini said Diem could charge higher fees for added value transactions.

In terms of infrastructure, Diem will rely on local institutions to secure the network. More intermediaries could mean higher transaction fees if each player is taking a cut, but Diem is hoping that at scale, competition among intermediaries to facilitate the payments will tamp down the transaction costs to a figure much lower than legacy structures.

At the time of this presentation, Diem was still awaiting approval from FINMA.

Trials for Novi Wallet were planned to use a small amount of Diem and this required FINMA to approve of Diem’s licence. FINMA brought in over 20 over regulators worldwide to judge and it was approved by all accept… The United States Treasury.

Bastards.

Excuses about allowing Biden time to settle into office were touted. Levey was furious, Dante Disparte – Head of Policy – left in exhaustion and frustration. Fuck it, Levey ordered, we taking this back to America. So, the HQ for Diem was taken from Switzerland to USA. This is where Silvergate bank enter picture, they worked with Diem to help with the Motherlands regulation.

A new launch date was announced in July 2021 and on the eve of the launch, Yellen informed it was to no go ahead. Mark Van Der Wilde told a comprehensive regulatory framework for stablecoins needed to be in place.

Levey did the political version of a drive-by, he wrote a strongly worded letter to Yellen and Powell. All these other stablecoins exist yet go unchecked, meanwhile, Facebook try to establish one and nothing but hassle. Poor Facebook.

Silvergate bowed out.

There was one last phone of the dice. There was a stablecoin that was regulated at state level.

Libra Needed Gemini.

Zuckerberg needed Winklevii.

Diem turned to Gemini for assistance and the NY DFS Superintendent Linda Lacewell welcomed it. There was hope on the horizon. Gemini would release Diem on their exchange. Then Cuomo sexually harassed people – allegedly – and his office left town, Lacewell included.

Another exhausted roll of the dice came when Marcus tried to launch Novi and trial it with the Paxos dollar. Once again Congress came in to halt proceedings.

Dejected and without hope, Levey announced Diem was going to be sold in December 2021. Zuck was tired of the negative attention the project kept bring to the Facebook name. January 31st, Silvergate bought the assets under Diem and Novi staffers were told to focus on how digital currency will work with Meta’s metaverse.

Catalini wrote in a post, “A senior US regulator informed us that Diem was the best-designed stablecoin project the USG had seen, and the President's Working Group framework validated our design. Through economic research, we raised the bar for stablecoin reserve and consumer protection standards.”

An idea is the most resilient parasite. One that has nestled in with all that ambition, advancement, work and ego, is it simply going to end there?

I am going to list this mans career. It is significant.

KPMG – Senior Associate, June 2007 – Nov 2010

Royal Bank of Canada Capital Markets - Senior Analyst Oct 2010 – Sept 2012

Black Rock - Real Estate Associate, Aug 2012 – June 2014

ClearBridge Investments – REIT Analyst, June 2015 – Aug 2015

Abraaj Group – Private Equity Associate, Aug 2015 – Oct 2015

Boston Consulting Group – Consultant, Sept 2016 – Aug 2017

ConsenSys – Director of Strategy, Sept 2017 – May 2020

Meridio – Founder, CEO, October 2017 – May 2020

Meta – Strategic Partnerships, May 2020 – Dec 2021

Stealth – Board Member, March 2021 – Present

Techstars – Advisor, Sept 2018 – Present

R3 – Advisor, May 2020 – Present

Hunter College – June 2021 – Present

Bank Prov – Member Board of Directors, Jan 2022 – Present

Aptos – Co-founder & CEO, Dec 2021 – Present

Holy shit. His first job is at KPMG and the man takes temp jobs as a REIT analysis. This man is an advisor to R3. I need to highlight this as R3 is important. It originated as 9 major banks deciding to build a consortium dedicated to the design and deployment of DLT for monetary transfer. David Rutter is a founder and chief executive for R3.

A thing call Six Digital Exchange (SDX) have permission from FINMA – something Diem did not achieve – to operate a stock exchange and a central securities depository for digital assets in Switzerland. SDX are using Corda, which is software formed under R3.

SDX global partners network is Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, OMFIF, R3, WEF, InterWork Alliance, ISSA, Global Digital Finance, F10, Global Blockchain Business Council, Chamber of Digital Commerce.

This is important to keep a check on as these people and organisations are crucial in the CBDC movement.

FQX have made the E-Note, this is an electronic promissory note. It is based on DLPC (BAFT) and Delaware law, the benefit of the eNote is its global transferability. FQX has struck a deal with SDX. The idea here is Switzerland is the incubator for major and central blockchain systems, and ecosystem, to help break open the liquidity silos that formulate in the current legacy systems.

Corda is an open-source, Java-centric, private blockchain. Who uses it? CitiBank, Banco Bradesco, MetLife, Inc., China Merchants Bank, BNP Paribas S.A., between them that is roughly $329,270,000,000 between them in revenue. There is also AWS, Nasdaq, Accenture, Deon Digital, who are featured partners.

R3’s Corda is the software it is being built on. Shaikh is now an advisor to R3. Shaikh has co-created a Layer 1 that can do around 160,000 TPS.

R3 raised $107mm in investment from its initial 18 month opening, after being founded in 2013 (or 2015 depending on your source) by Rutter and Todd McDonald. Rutter’s approach to banks was cautious and led with cost saving, whilst Facebook came in, what Rutter remarked, naively and ridiculously stupid. His reasoning was because they wondered into a highly-regulated industry with no idea how to navigate it, and that was evident in their outcome.

At Facebook, Shaikh was perhaps given a great opportunity and salary to build on his work and ideas but it is with his connections and influence at R3 is where he will see more traction to his work. Having Rutter rather than Zucker is going to further his ambition for a Layer 1 for Every 1.

An aside, the head of Galaxy Digital, Tim Grant, is the head of SDX.

Aptos loosely translated to English means “where two streams meet.” Why pick this name for the project? It could be in reference to Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching being credited as co-founders of Aptos. Two great minds meet. It could be referencing that the transaction execution is decoupled from the consensus protocol. Together, this provides, by current standards, a highly scalable, ridiculously fast, composable protocol. The ambition behind the project is to be used by billions of users.

Avery Ching worked at Novi and is considered a co-creator of the Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus protocol deployed on the Diem blockchain.

Avery Ching and Mo Shaikh have launched Aptos. I will paste Shaikh’s own words on the project:

“Since departing Meta (formerly Facebook) we have been able to put our ideas into motion, ditch bureaucratic red tape, and build an entirely new network from the ground up that brings them to fruition. We’re now ready to socialize those ideas more broadly and start shipping the infrastructure that we’ve been perfecting.

“Aptos will be built in part on the technology we developed in the open over the past three years. Aptos is using Move, the safe and reliable language originally developed for Diem. The ideas we conceived then are still relevant and will serve as an important foundation for a safe, scalable, upgradable Web3. Our plans for decentralization and permissionless access are progressing quickly and will be developed in the open.

“… My cofounder, Avery Ching, is one of the world’s leading experts in building distributed systems and scaling them for billions of users. The rest of the founding team at Aptos consists of an impressive group of PhDs, researchers, engineers, designers and strategists including Alden Hu, Alin Tomescu, Dahlia Malkhi , David Wolinsky, Greg Nazario, Jake Skinner, Josh Lind, Max Kaplan, Mo Ahmed, Neil Harounian, Rati Gelashivili, Rustie Lin, Sasha Spiegelman, Sherry Xiao, Sital Kedia and Zekun Li.

“…It is the lowest latency, optimistically-responsive BFT protocol available, and it features a robust, on-chain reputation system and novel methods for parallel execution — a key enabler of speed at scale. We will rapidly deploy many key innovations in performance, functionality and improvements to the overall user experience and leverage our ability to do major upgrades seamlessly in the process.”

Avery Ching puts:

“Our team has developed a production-grade, low latency Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) engine. We have implemented our fourth iteration of the protocol (the most advanced HotStuff derivative) over the past three years. During that time, we have upgraded the consensus protocol in a private mainnet environment with a diverse set of operators and zero downtime. Our first implementation of the BFT protocol added an active pacemaker that used timeouts to synchronize validators much more quickly than waiting for increasing timeouts. With our latest improvement to the protocol, blocks are committed in as few as two network round-trips, making sub-second finality the common case. Our novel reputation system analyzes the on-chain state and automatically updates leader rotations to adjust for non-responsive validators without any human intervention, making it well suited for decentralized environments. Furthermore, our protocol clearly separates liveness from safety. No matter if the network is unreachable or the non-safety core is compromised in some way, the chain will not fork as long as the BFT honesty guarantees are upheld. The safety of our consensus protocol has been both audited and formally verified.

“…our research on a family of DAG based consensus protocols (i.e. All You Need Is DAG, Narwhal and Tusk: A DAG-based Mempool and Efficient BFT Consensus and Bullshark: DAG BFT Protocols Made Practical) demonstrate that this class of protocols can range from 125,000 to 160,000 tps or even beyond. However, these throughput numbers do not represent end-to-end blockchain throughput as they only take into account consensus, network, and partial storage considerations. They do not factor in other important considerations such as transaction execution times, account access patterns, or authenticated data structures (e.g. Merkle trees) in a production blockchain. On the finality side, block times often get mistaken for finality when in fact, block times are an input factor to finality.”

The Aptos blockchain history taken from their Medium:

The Aptos technology stack was researched, designed, and developed by a 30+ person crypto platform research and engineering team with domain expertise and PhDs in consensus, cryptography, distributed systems, formal verification, security, etc. The codebase has grown substantially over 3+ years with 292 unique developers and dozens of community driven improvement proposals. It was battle-tested in a production environment through a number of different use cases and operated by numerous enterprise operators for over a year with over a dozen possible disaster scenarios. We conducted multiple successful significant upgrades in a private mainnet with zero downtime. The codebase is open source and community governed with a long-term goal to build infrastructure that can be used for many networks. The community is ready and excited to see this technology ship and unlock many new applications going forward.

2022 Q1 (March 15th) — Developer testnet launch

Work with strategic partners and the web3 developer community to gather feedback and make improvements with respect to the Move developer experience and Move language

2022 Q2 — Incentivized testnet launch

A larger and mainnet-like test playground for strategic partners and web3 developers to build

Work with the node operator community to onboard and build expertise on operating the decentralized network together

Start a bug bounty to improve the developer experience, node operations, and address infrastructure issues

Provide incentive alignment for all participants that help secure the network

2022 Q3 — Mainnet launch

2022 Q4–2023 Q1 — Deploy the next major release to Aptos mainnet with the next set of significant features

Anchorage Digital, BNB Chain, Blockorus, Coinbase, Livepeer, Moonclave, Paymagic, Paxos, Rarible, Streaming Fast are building on Aptos currently.

Sam double-majored in Computer Science and Philosophy from Williams College and earned a PhD in Programming Languages from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has co-authored 18 papers to date. After being a research intern for Microsoft, and a stop as a research assistant at University of Colorado, Blackshear was at Facebook from 2015 until 2018 when he was promoted to Principal Engineer of Novi.

Blackshear is a static analyser is, by the accounts I have read and judging by the legacy of his work, he is very good at it. He developed bug finding tools and is an exceptionally smart person, with keen academic interest in philosophy, mathematics and computer science. Facebook were impressed by him and after joining in 2015, he created Infer, the bug tool, static analyser, for Facebook.

This was some what of a pioneer move. Other companies now employ teams of static analysers. A good analogy I read for a static analyser is consider the blueprint to a building. Sometimes, it is when the building is created, people find out there was something wrong with the blue print. So, you need someone to be able to see errors in the blueprint. If you swap blueprint with code and you have a static analyser.

Under the Diem project, he was the Maintainer of Move and the Move VM, which he co-created. He was the first person to work on Move and the team blossomed. The aim of the Move language is to provide a smart-contract programming language that allows users to write programs that manage and transfer assets while providing extremely trustworthy protection against sophisticated attacks – with the added caveat of having high TPS that is capable of taking on billions of users.

Sam says himself, “I am a dyed-in-the-wool functional programmer and my favourite programming language, besides Move, is Camel… the accounts you are doing on account-based blockchains is inherently Imperative, and that is why we work with Imperative.” Imperative is a programming-language that uses statements to change a programme’s state. It is a kinder approach that unpacking the global situation of the blockchain and them packing it back into the chain, which is more what Solidity does.

The Bytecode language is deployed on chain, the source language is what users interact with, this is nice to users and Sam states this is more of a soft-science, a social science. The hard-science is with bytecode is where the safety is, the low-level guarantees. They comply together.

It was November 2021 when he co-founded Mysten Labs.

He did a talk on 0L discord about Move and Sui and 0L but I bloody missed it.

Like our boy Sam, Evan joined Facebook in 2015 as Director of Engineering, he had worked the previous 10 years at Apple. In September 2021, he tweeted, “Going all in. Doing something new in crypto”, then a month later Mysten Labs was founded.

As of June 15, 2021, he invested in Parsiq, who in turn invested in Metis.

Reasons Chang joined the crypto world from the Apple-universe is down to three reasons.

Crypto and blockchain are highly efficient ways to model and transfer assets. He enjoys the technical challenge. Lastly, he likes the energy of the space, the mavericks, the pioneers, the collaboration, has attracted him to the arena.

He has built large scale systems and tools that are accessible to users, he also considers getting funding in the space easy due to the immediacy of getting the money back, unlike other areas of tech. He mentions how early we are as the mainstream still lacks the understanding of the potential and see crypto as a scam.

Aptos may have raised $200mm in an investment round but Mysten Labs has raised $3. Fuck me. At first I thought, it is just a typo, I open the video and the computer voice says $3 too. It must be true! Evan Chang really went out there and brought the bacon to the butty.

In reality, ML raised $36M in funding from a16z and Coinbase Ventures in December 2021.

Evans spoke of how it was a grind working with regulators at Diem. He believes there is a good chance the project will not succeed due to nuanced regulation that Facebook cannot overcome. The transition to Web 3 is going to be costly and in the way is programmability and scalability. ML is aiming to build the infrastructure for Web 3.0. They are developing the engineering components that will used in product construction for clients.

Narwhal, a high-performance memory pool, or mempool, also known as transaction pool. This has been developed in partnership with Celo and Sommelier. This can be integrated with any BFT protocol, for example Aptos Layer 1. Move language is going to be used for Celo and Sommelier.

This will enable the open source payment network Celo to achieve a throughput of more than 140,000 TPS despite global network delays. The Move language will bring smart contracts to Cosmos.

The Narwhal & Tusk BFT Protocol paper just best paper at EuroSys. From arxiv.org, “Composing Narwhal with a partially synchronous consensus protocol (Narwhal-HotStuff) yields significantly better throughput even in the presence of faults or intermittent loss of liveness due to asynchrony. However, loss of liveness can result in higher latency. To achieve overall good performance when faults occur we design Tusk, a zero-message overhead asynchronous consensus protocol, to work with Narwhal. We demonstrate its high performance under a variety of configurations and faults. As a summary of results, on a WAN, Narwhal-Hotstuff achieves over 130,000 tx/sec at less than 2-sec latency compared with 1,800 tx/sec at 1-sec latency for Hotstuff. Additional workers increase throughput linearly to 600,000 tx/sec without any latency increase. Tusk achieves 160,000 tx/sec with about 3 seconds latency. Under faults, both protocols maintain high throughput, but Narwhal-HotStuff suffers from increased latency.”

To read the paper, here is the link: https://sonnino.com/papers/narwhal-and-tusk.pdf

Narwhal has been experimented on AWS, which is on page 9 of the paper under “Evaluation”.

This may be of interest, taken from page 11/12, the paper highlights how it out performs previous systens such as Quorum-based systems, such Hyperledger Fabric and Corda:

“However, performance under attack is 0 20k 40k 60k 80k 100k 120k Throughput (tx /s) 0.0 5.0 10.0 15.0 20.0 25.0 30.0 35.0 40.0 Latency (s) Tusk, 10 nodes (1 faulty) Tusk, 10 nodes (3 faulty) Narwhal-HS, 10 nodes (1 faulty) Narwhal-HS, 10 nodes (3 faulty) Batched-HS, 10 nodes (1 faulty) Batched-HS, 10 nodes (3 faulty) Baseline-HS, 10 nodes (1 faulty) Baseline-HS, 10 nodes (3 faulty) Figure 8. Comparative throughput-latency under faults. WAN measurements with 10 validators, using 1 worker collocated with the primary. One and three faults, 500KB max. block size and 512B transaction size. much contested. Early work suggests that specially crafted attacks can degrade the performance of PBFT consensus systems massively, to such a lower performance point that liveness guarantees are meaningless. Recent work targeting PBFT in Hyperledger Fabric corroborates these results and shows latency grows from a few seconds to a few hundred seconds, just through blocks being delayed. Han et al. report similar dramatic performance degradation in cases of simple node crash failure for a number of quorum-based systems namely Hyperledger Fabric, Ripple and Corda. In contrast, we demonstrate that Narwhal combined with a traditional consensus mechanism, such as HotStuff maintains its throughput under attack, with increased latency.”

In a conclusion on page 9, “…In one sentence, Narwhal and Tusk conclusively prove that the main cost of large-scale blockchain protocols is not consensus but the reliable transaction dissemination. Yet, dissemination alone, without global sequencing, is an embarrassingly parallelizable function, as we show with the scale-out design of Narwhal. Our work supports a rethinking in how distributed ledgers and SMR systems are architected, towards pairing a mempool, like Narwhal, to ensure high-throughput even under faults and asynchrony, with a consensus mechanism to achieve low-latency for fixed-size messages. Tusk demonstrates that there exists a zero-message overhead consensus for Narwhal, secure under full asynchrony. As a result, quorum-based blockchains can scale to potentially millions of transactions per second through scale-out for payments or to build generic reliable systems through state machine replication and smart contracts.”

Move Prover is another tool developed by Mysten Labs. Changes in the Diem framework must be successfully verified before being integrated into the open source repository on GitHub, which Move Prover helps verify if a smart contract will work.

For a company that has launched officially in December, they have provided a lot in a few months, already launching their testnet. This has happened due to the work that was done at Diem. Blackshear et al authored a paper called “Move Prover” back in 2020.

The company is 50 people strong with people from Google, Apple, Facebook involved. A goal is to build technology that is not owned by one company. They work with Sommelier, Celo and Cosmos so far.

Team: Evan Cheng

Co-Founder, CEO

Adeniyi Abiodun

Co-Founder, CPO

Sam Blackshear

Co-Founder, CTO

George Danezis

Co-Founder, Chief Scientist

Kostas Chalkias

Co-Founder, Chief Cryptographer

Carries on Libra’s ideal of a fair launch, that no tokens are given to VC’s, and there is no pre-mine. It has taken the great work from Diem with some changes. They have moved it into a permissionless environment. On Diem, any account could be frozen so this was removed. It can also make autopayments possible.

It is a collective work. The validators donate 50% of their rewards to the community wallets and those community wallets will be used to fund the project activities.

With Mysten Labs, they are currently running join hackathons as a way to incentivise and expose developers to Move.

Zaki Manian is credited as a contributor to 0L.

Mustafa Al-Bassam is the CEO of Celestia. Now, he was never a part of Libra but he was a part of the projects with the people that went into Libra.

Celestia claims to be working towards a new paradigm in blockchain design. Which boasts to be the first modular blockchain and if I am honest, I don’t know what the fuck that means. A tweet from Polyna says, “[Celestia is] the ‘first data availability sampling layer’ - although conceived first, both Polygon Avail and Celestia claim to be launching around a similar timeframe (late 2022, early 2023). Wish the best to both.”

Further, the first chain in the modular paradigm", in which case it would be Loopring which went live on mainnet in Feb 2020 and there is an argument for Plasma.

All I can say that is “Sure”.

This is the consensus algorithm that is underneath the BFT for Libra. In Hotstuff, a node sends a message directly to the Leader rather than the mesh communication method.

This is from a thread by Crypto Swim. CEO of Oasis Labs, Dawn Song, and Sam Blackshear spoke about a responsible data economy.

The first image is from Oasis whitepaper stating how HotStuff, which can replace the Oasis consensus algorithm. Above is the Diem whitepaper, which shows the consensus algorithm is HotStuff.

The appeal of HotStuff is the high throughput, low latency, be efficient, highly secure, and flexible.

One of Novi Labs industrial partners was IC3, Dawn Song used to be the Co-Director of IC3.

Oasis is backed by a16z, Accel (Breyer), Pantera and Polychain Capital.

If you dig into anything regarding payment system goals, CBDCs, DLTs and Central Banks, the point of running a monetary network 24/7 will arise. Currently, banks operating systems run 40 hours a week.

SEN – the Silvergate Exchange Network – allows its users to move money around via digital currency 24/7.

They have three investors:

CMT Digital Group, they have a basic, poor choice in colour, website that is still in construction. They are a part of CMT Group.

Strandview Capital. They only invest in a few projects, which are along the lines of mortgage providers, medical insurance, a small bank.

Then there is Digital Currency Group. This is the lead investor of Silvergate. They also invest in Greyscale,

Glenn Hutchins is a co-founder of DCG and he was a board member of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as well as being many other things, Hutchins was a special advisor to Bill Clinton.

Co-founder Barry Silbert also founded SecondMarket, this was a liquid asset marketplace that went onto be acquired by NASDAQ in 2015. An article featured on Verizon from 8 years ago, Silbert spoke of how Facebook will have remittances, it will become the go-to platform for e-payments.

On its board advisors is Larry fucking Summers.

The board of Silvergate host people who have worked for banks such as HSBC, KMPG, Citigroup, DSF Management Corporation, Goldman Sachs, Andreessen Horowitz. Aanchal Gupta is VP and she worked at Novi.  Michael Lempres is Andreessen’s man on the inside. Lempres became the Chairman of the Board from June 2021 onwards, which is coincidently is when a16z announced a $2.2bn fund for crypto and just in time for the diaspora of Diem. People like Evan Chang and Shaikh were formulating their latest endeavours that continued the legacy of their work under Facebook. And Marc Andreessen ‘loses’ Lempres to Silvergate, who are reported to have purchased Diem’s technology assets for around $182mm.

You don’t get to this level without having a chess-like mind.

This man works hard and is well connected. He advises or has advised and invested in Saudi Arabia, Facebook, Twitter, Ebay, Skype, Airbnb, Sky Mavis (Axie Infinity), multiple start-ups, he is massive in the high married into Laura Arrillaga – the daughter of John Arrillaga. John, who passed away January 2022, who invested early into semiconductors and high-end tech, he ended up being one of the largest landowners in Silicon Valley. On paper, Andreesen seems the perfect son-in-law for John, and John the perfect father-in-law.

From 2006 to 2022, Andreesen and Horowitz went from $40mm invested all the way to $28.2bn in held in assets under the firm. Chris Dixon reports that the crypto fund is around $3bn- $4.5bn. Chris Dixon and Katie Huan are the dedicated minds to A ‘n’ H’s crypto fund.

The crypto fund is too big to be silo’ed and will be folded back into the central funds. One of Marc’s top skills is recognising talent and he was a keen reader of Dixon’s blog and decided to bring him into the Venture Capital game. Dixon has gone on to provide great return on investments for the firm.

Andreesen and Horowitz do not just provide funding for teams and projects, they provide a network and help them recruit. Marc said founders tend to get supplanted by professional CEO’s because the professionals have spent years making connections in an industry whereas the founder has spent most of their time creating. He aims to help founders attempt to bridge that gap.

As he sits on the board of Facebook, now Meta of course, he was highly influential in the Diem process and his connections have helped bring people into the project. He is still influential in managing the project post-Facebook, with Silvergate in his pocket, funding Mysten and Aptos, ensuring the legacy remains close to him.

“From the outset, the Diem project has been focused on leveraging the benefits of blockchain technology to design a better and more inclusive payment system. The members of the Diem Association and our outstanding team pursued this vision with determination and perseverance, motivated by the desire to deliver substantial benefits to consumers and businesses, along with a payments solution for those who are currently underserved or excluded altogether from the traditional financial system.

We are proud of the work that the Association, our partners, and our team have done. This has included building and testing a blockchain-based payment system with industry-leading controls to protect consumers and combat financial crime, that is intended to be safe for people making ordinary day-to-day payments.

One of our highest priorities in designing the Diem Payment Network was building in controls to protect it against misuse by illicit actors. We addressed that concern in ways that are novel in the industry, implementing numerous controls that were recognized as innovative by regulators. Among these controls was a prohibition on anonymous transactions, which pose both a sanctions and money laundering risk.

As we undertook this effort, we actively sought feedback from governments and regulators around the world, and the project evolved substantially and improved as a result. In the United States, a senior regulator informed us that Diem was the best-designed stablecoin project the US Government had seen.

We are gratified that the subsequent Report on Stablecoins issued by the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets validated many of Diem’s core design features. Those features address not only the risks related to the issuance of a stablecoin, but also the risks associated with transferring stablecoins between parties.

Despite giving us positive substantive feedback on the design of the network, it nevertheless became clear from our dialogue with federal regulators that the project could not move ahead. As a result, the best path forward was to sell the Diem Group’s assets, as we have done today to Silvergate.

We remain confident in the potential for a stablecoin operating on a blockchain designed like Diem’s to deliver the benefits that motivated the Diem Association from the beginning. With today’s sale, Silvergate will be well-placed to take this vision forward. Over the coming weeks, the Diem Association and its subsidiaries expect to begin the process of winding down, but we look forward to seeing the design choices – and the ideals –

of Diem thrive.”

Eric Zabinski, Eric Geffner, Ashleigh Stanley, David Johnson, and Sarah Levesque at O’Melveny & Myers LLP, Stuart Levi and Mana Ghaemmaghami at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, and Mark Jansen and Meghan Kloeber at Fenwick & West LLP served as Diem’s legal advisors. Eric Risley and Peter Stoneberg at Architect Partners LLC served as financial advisors to Diem. Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC served as financial advisor to Silvergate and Holland & Knight served as Silvergate’s legal advisor.

Facebook could not get Libra/Diem through due to the tough regulatory landscape and their own naivety. They did develop and incubate great talent and technology. It may seem they have lost control of this but under the Association there were founding members with equal say. Now, the project has been broken up and sifted through Silvergate,

If you consider the people behind Facebook – Breyer, Marc Andreessen, In-Q-Tel, The Mongols – this is more of a fluid project. This is not as straightforward as once upon a time Zuckerberg and his orcs decided to make a digital currency. No. It seems to me it is a part of a broader plan and goal and Facebook was the ideal conduit to try and move that plan and goal through it.

The whole surveillance of money, having Facebook as an intermediary for finance is perfect considering the purpose of In-Q-Tel having Facebook was to record everything about a person. It just did not go fully to plan.

Finance loves liquidity and no borders, especially those involved in crypto-economics. The brightest minds adapt for they appreciate life is not going as according to plan as first hoped but it doesn’t mean you should stop after the first hurdle. It isn’t that Facebook failed, it just needs to adjust. So far Facebook has played its part and now the project/ideas/action need to flow where they can thrive.

As Andreessen said, you need to have goals that are set and determined but your tactics need to be very, very flexible. “It takes a decade or more to build something significant,” in his own words.

Over the course of attempts to adapt and change payment systems, start-ups happen and get absorbed, or the plan did not take off due to the tech. Ideas are fluid and love active minds. Culture is a battleground for ideas to see which come out on top and the arsenal and personnel that are behind the ideas of tech of Diem is quite substantial.

This project is causing a brain drain in the “old” Big Tech of Apple, Microsoft and Google.

Pay attention to what these people do.

You know this, I know this, the goal posts are being moved for the global financial system and a new world is squirming out from the old world. You create things that make the old world obsolete. From the first bronze sword to blockchain.

Mo Shaikh’s words:

“We are the founders, researchers, designers, and builders of Diem, the first blockchain developed for this purpose… while the rest of the world never saw what we produced, our job is far from done”

David Marcus - He sold his first company at 27. In 2011, a subsequent mobile payments start-up he founded, called Zong, was acquired by PayPal for $240mn. Within nine months, he was PayPal’s president. In 2014, Zuckerberg recruited him to run Messenger, which he’d help grow to more than 1.3bn users.

Learned basic computer coding at age 8.

Sam Blackshear – Talented and tall static analysis who created the Move programming language.

Mo Shaikh – Co-founder of Aptos, worked with top companies.

Avery Chang - worked at Novi and is considered a co-creator of the Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus protocol deployed on the Diem blockchain.

Dante Disparte – Now Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Global Policy for Circle, a member of the World Economic Forum’s Digital Currency Governance Consortium. Background in risk and security advisory.

Christian Catalini – Head economist of Meta Fintech, Member of CBDC Engagement Forum for Bank of England.

Saumya Bhasvar -  a Credit Suisse banker Libra hired as a legal expert.

Calibra – A subsidiary of Facebook. Was headed by David Marcus, charged to create a wallet to connect crypto users to Facebook. It was renamed Novi.

Diogo Mónica – co-founder and President of Anchorage, the crypto arm of Andreessen Horowitz.

Scott Kupor - leading the helm as Managing Partner and CEO of Andreessen Horowitz.

Joe Lallouz – Etsy founder, founded Bison Trail, which he is CEO of, and it is a blockchain infrastructure platform. Runs on Algorand, Tezos, Decred.

Bison Trail – Blockchain Infrastructure platform. Node operator of Oasis protocol.

DST Global - a venture capital and private equity firm that primarily invests in late-stage internet companies. Estimated $50bn under management. Founded by Yuri Milner.

Neville Crawley – CEO of Kiva.

Goldman Sachs – served as financial and legal advisors to Silvergate in the Diem process.

Evan Cheng – Worked at Apple, was a director at Novi Research, co-founded Mysten Labs

Dahlia Malkhi – CTO of Diem Association - Novi

IC3 – Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts

Fred Ehrsam – Co-Founder of Paradigm. Paradigm is a member of Diem association and Fred Ehrsam is an investor of Oasis in a Series A round of funding. Fred and Andreessen are the two largest shareholders of Class A Coinbase stock.

Olaf Carlson-Wee – First Employee of Coinbase, started Polychain Capital.

George Danezis – Franco-Greco, key developer in the Coconut Protocol. Libra incorporated a lot of his ideas. He works with Sui now. Co-founder and Chief Scientist of Mysten Labs.

“Coconut is a novel selective disclosure credential scheme supporting distributed threshold issuance, public and private attributes, re-randomization, and multiple unlinkable selective attribute revelations. Coconut integrates with blockchains to ensure confidentiality, authenticity and availability even when a subset of credential issuing authorities are malicious or offline. We implement and evaluate a generic Coconut smart contract library for Chainspace and Ethereum; and present three applications related to anonymous payments, electronic petitions, and distribution of proxies for censorship resistance. Coconut uses short and computationally efficient credentials, and our evaluation shows that most Coconut cryptographic primitives take just a few milliseconds on average, with verification taking the longest time (10 milliseconds).”

Sui - A permissionless proof-of-stake blockchain network being developed by Evan Cheng, Sam Blackshear, Adeniyi Abiodun, and George Danezis

Mustafa Al-Bassam – Iraqi-British computer prodigy, co-founder of LulsSec in 2011. He and others compromised a number of high profile organizations and corporations, including Sony, Fox, News International, Nintendo and the CIA.  His last Linked In role is with Nym as an advisor. CEO of Celestia.

Celestia claims to be working towards a new paradigm in blockchain design.

Dave Hrycyszyn – London living Canadian. He is a co-author of the blockchain-sharding protocol Chainspace and the leaderless, PBFT-variant consensus protocol Blockmania, the prototype of which turned out to be likely the world’s fastest distributed ledger (400,000 TPS with 2 secs finality), garnering interest from Facebook’s Libra. Dave briefly went to Libra with the rest of the Chainspace team before leaving to become Nym’s CTO.

He worked on (and wrote the book on) the open-source Scalatra microframework, used to build parts of NetFlix, the BBC's Linked Data project, and McLaren's high-speed timeseries data store. Previously, as CTO at a London-based agile software consultancy, he led major development projects for many large organisations and startups.

Balaji Srinivasan -  former chief technology officer of Coinbase and former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

Kevin Weil – June 2018 – 2021 April, VP of Product Novi; co-creator Diem (fka Libra).  May 2009 – Feb 2016, SVP Product Twitter. VP Product at Instagram May 2016 – June 2018. Board Member of Strava Nov 2016 – Present. Team Member on Council on Foreign Relations June 2019 – Present.

Chris Dixon - He is now a general partner of Andreesen Horowitz and runs their Crypto Fund with Katie Haun. He topped Forbes Midas Touch 2022 list, He has led the funding rounds for Coinbase and OpenSea, Yuga Labs. Dixon is not a fan of Facebook, he even says, “we are going to do everything we can to replace them with a new set of companies”. He taught himself to code. Took a job as a developer at a hedge fund.

He cofounded SiteAdvisor and within a year, McAfee bought up the business. He cofounded Hunch, which was bought by Ebay. He has a blog piece from 2010 that is a defence of NFTs 10 years before NFTs. He bought Kitty no.15 right at the start of Crypto Kitty.

He invested it in Oculus and begrudgingly sold it to Facebook due to the investment the project needed. Samsung were the only company going to make the specialised screens but it required $1bn investment.

Passing time with Psilocybe Want some Diem-T? 13.4.2022

Alright, come on in. I give a history of Libra/Diem, and provide a little background to some of the key names. To be honest, I wish to delve into the wider web of the Association, it would have taken months to do thorough on all the people involved. Therefore, at the end there is a list of names with a concise adage. Have a skim and a swim, there is some interesting stuff in here.

Introduction

The Story of Diem So Far…

Mo Shaikh

Aptos

Sam Blackshear

Evan Chang

Mysten Labs

0L

Celestia

Hotstuff

Silvergate

Marc Andreessen

Stuart Levey’s Statement

Some Closing Thoughts

Names | who’s who?

Tech requires nerds and business requires connections. In tech history there is often a small group of nerds that come to together and produce something. They move on to do other things and due to their connections, they can boost one another’s start-ups.

The PayPal Mafia are an example of the Western tech landscape being shaped by a small group of nerdy business fellas who did not like jocks. Here is a well-made interactive map of PayPal connections: https://fleximize.com/paypal-mafia/

The next line is the Ethereum Cartel. If anyone says Ethereum Mafia, they are lazy.

The Ethereum story has a bit more bitterness to the break-up but fundamentally any new project that resides in the crypto-world has to be integral to the fact that Ethereum is the big decentralised, pioneering elephant in the room.

With the previous two examples, they made a product that went public. For the topic today, the product never made it public. It even struggled for public trials. An array of top talent came together and developed high-end tech but in order for this to see the light of day, they have had to leave the association behind and create new projects to shelter the creations.

This is the Diem Diaspora

CUE THE MUSIC

There is a decent article in the Financial Times named, “Facebook Libra: the inside story of how the company’s crypto currency dream died”. It is a nice vanilla read that had to fit a word count and a good starting point. It does seem to cut out a lot and it would leave you to believe this was all David Marcus’s idea. It does not what we know, dear reader, so I have taken the key points, put in key details it seemed to gloss over.

David Marcus, of PayPal fame, resigned from Coinbase board, and at the beginning of this story, he was leading Messenger when he thought of combining Facebook and crypto. Marcus called Zuck up present his idea. In 2018, he left Messenger but was still working for Facebook. Around the same time, some important developers, whom I shall name later, in the blockchain space were recruited as researchers. Ripples were spilling outwards and people were curious.

Morgan Beller was at Andreessen Horowitz then went on to join Facebook’s corporate development team and was a keen blockchain advocate, she was trying her best to convince Facebook to make the use of blockchain and Bitcoin mining. It was an ideal fit then that Marcus teamed up with Beller in 2018 to begin the project at Facebook’s HQ. The projects potential was quickly recognised, the two and their team were put into quarters where access was only given to those who were relevant to the project for Facebook wanted there to be no chance of a leak.

A full story of the origins may arise some day. The FT article leads with David Marcus having the idea but it depends on your source. Other sources say it was Beller leading the torch for blockchain at Facebook and Marcus joined her later on, perhaps after he spoke with Zuckerberg, Mark sent Markus to Morgan.

What I found on in the FT article is that it cuts out Christian Catalini from the story. He is credited as the Co-Creator of Libra and a well-respected mind this crypto-economic space. You don’t have to wade too deep into a Google search to recognise the man has intellectual and professional pedigree, yet that seems to go over the heads at the Financial Times.

In 2013, Catalini co-designed MIT Bitcoin with Catherine Tucker. They gave $100 of Bitcoin to thousands of students, by 2016, on 14% were still actively using it. In the project, there were prizes such as the “Next Billion”, which rewarded innovative applications that focused on the developed world. The next billion meaning the unbanked of the world.

The goal was to explore the capabilities of this new-fangled technology and how it could potentially democratise money. His narrative reads that he grew frustrated with its limitations but he did figure Facebook would be the ideal place to create the technology necessary for his ideas and ambition, due to their engineering talent, reach and funds.

I find it really interesting in his narrative he just jumps to Facebook, he does not mention that there was a short list of say, Apple and Google and others. Michael Cusumano, SMR Distinguished Professor of Management at MIT Sloan, said that Libra was influenced by WeChat but even though WeChat in China offers the combination of sending money in a social media platform, it is not compatible with other payment systems.

WhatsApp plus Payment Systems = WeChat.

That is when it clicked. If you have read Cannon of Insanity, you can appreciate the depth of Breyer, the man who is everywhere, MIT and CIA. Breyer is crucial to Facebook’s story as well as the cloud computing revolution and the tech centre of China. It brings a new meaning behind why Catalini appreciated Facebooks reach, talent pool and funds.

Catalini said that this project will bring a new business model for Facebook, it is not simply a way to show more advertisements.

Cusumano also pointed out, in November 2019, that it was a bad time for Facebook to attempt this due to their serious misuse of data and security of people’s data. How prophetic he was.

The project was to be called Libra. The dream was to launch it on open-source technology. It was to be moved away from Facebook directly and put under the Libra Association, which had Uber, Vodafone, Spotify, Visa and Mastercard as founding members. Facebook would lead the initiative; the founding members would have equal voting as well as put $10mm into the reserve. The association was moved to Switzerland and had 28 companies and non-profits, who would integrate Libra. Not only would it be exposed to Facebooks 2bn users, there is the central payment systems, taxi cost, the top streaming service, and the dominant mobile company, as well as the other partners, giving exposure to the coin.

Payments: PayU, Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, Stripe

Technology/Ecommerce marketplaces: Calibra, Lyft, Spotify, Uber, Farfetch, Ebay, Booking Holdings, Mercado Pago

Non-profit and multilateral organizations, academic institutions: Creative Destruction Lab, Kiva, Mercy Corps, Women’s World Banking.

Telecommunications: Illiad, Vodafone

Crypto/Blockchain: Coinbase, Anchorage (a subsidiary of Andreessen Horowitz), Bison Trails, Xapo

Venture Capital: Andreessen Horowitz, Breakthrough Initiatives, Ribbit Capital, Thrive Capital, Union Square Ventures

There was a lot of optimism. The world was there to be melded to their will. A Libra Bug Programme was being launched. The Whitepaper for Libra was published in June 2019. This brought to life the initiative of the Move language. The founding members were to be the node operators to begin with but over time it would be opened up.

George Danezis, Shehar Bano and Alberto Sonnino began working for Facebook and this caught eagle-eyed observers attention. Danezis is famous for Coconut Protocol and the three of them co-founded Chainspace. Chainspace was a sharded, smart contracts platform, it described itself with having the ability for being able to execute to a planetary scale.  The purchase of Chainspace in February 2019 was seen as Facebook’s debut into blockchain and June 18th, Danezis tweets Libra is going public with their papers on Blockchain, Consensus, Move Language and VM. It has to date received 187 likes.

Mustafa Al-Bassam was the only co-founder of Chainspace to not move over to Libra for he did not believe in the decentralisation of the project, furthermore, even though Facebook may have good intentions he believed it will make things worse – i.e. more centralised.

Al-Bassam makes a point that our current financial system is more decentralised and more censorship resistant than what Libra proposed. Money requires no ledger and is permissionless. People in Iran can use their currency despite the sanctions upon them.

An observation, it is interesting to note how centralised the system is towards mainly Northern Europe. Still, money has to travel through networks and there are strong economic centres outside of Northern Europe. With Libra, it is a corral of $1bn+ valuated companies, largely US based, that make up the members. Furthermore, this Association was under the Swiss Federal Constitution via the Swiss Courts.

At the time of writing, this tweet received 974 likes

Al-Bassam criticised Libra at the time for saying they will have a blockchain of 1000TPS. However, that was the purpose of hire the staff of Chainspace. Their expertise was to help improve upon this. Dave Hrycyszyn, was attained by Libra, he co-authored not just Chainspace but also the leaderless, PBFT-variant consensus protocol Blockmania, the prototype of which turned out to be likely the world’s fastest distributed ledger clocking 400,000 TPS with 2 secs finality. He left after one month of Libra’s company to become Nym’s CTO.

Nym’s credentials build on further from Coconut’s, which was authored by Alberto Sonnino, Mustafa Al-Bassam, Shehar Bano, Sarah Meiklejohn, George Danezis. If I am correct in my reading, Coconut provides privacy on blockchain, which is the Nym Projects goal.

Now, back to the assortment of names that were within Libra, this was an attempt to show a regulated, slow moving industry that Libra had good faith. It was not a centralisation of money by Facebook, it was a democratic move to help bring more people into the system and provide much higher transaction rates to finance.

The aim of these payment projects is to bank the unbank, to bring people into the system. If you pay attention, none of these organisations are from unbanked regions. That is a little bit churlish, needless and snarky of me, after all, who would have a company in an unbanked region? Besides, Kiva is a money lending online platform that targets low-income entrepreneurs and students, which is a magnanimous goal. Straight from Wikipedia, “Since 2005, Kiva has crowd-funded more than 1.6 million loans, totaling over $1.68 billion, with a repayment rate of 96.3 percent.”

I felt a bit of respect for Kiva after reading that last line, then the following line reads, “Despite its size, independent review by GiveWell failed to find evidence that the organization produces significant social benefit, with at least one partner supposedly vetted by Kiva earning high profits while having a very high recipient drop-out rate.” …

If I drop my cynical hat for a second, it is expensive to be poor and the costs of access to education, remittance fees, healthcare, to simply live, can drown even the hardest of workers born into financially deprived circumstance. Therefore, innovations of the internet and cheaper payments systems that can happen due to the wonders of blockchain and DLTs is great and honourable to help alleviate poverty.

If I place my cynical hat back on, when it comes to Libra it feels like virtue-signalling and there are ulterior motives for this. “Facebook and pals are here to make your money better,” it just doesn’t sit right with me.

I did not know until writing this that Tencent owns 9% of Spotify and the biggest individual shareholder of Uber is Yasir Al-Rumayyan, Governor of the Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. If you are interested, Cayman 2 Ltd.SB (Softbank) is the biggest shareholder of Uber with a little over 10%. SoftBank were reported to have $100bn fund for underrepresented founders called the Vision Fund - PIF contributing $45 billion, SoftBank contributing $28 billion, the Mubadala Investment Company contributing $15 billion and the rest from other investors including Apple.

SoftBank is connected with Standard Chartered, Mizuho Bank, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Microsoft, Apple and more. They are a massive conglomerate.

As you can see, the foothold the project would have in infecting, I mean invading, I mean improving the economic system is quite substantial. They have the capital investment to roll it out, the core payment systems ready to employ it; Ebay, Uber and Spotify are sitting on billions in transactions and peer-to-peer interaction. For Facebook, this was great. All that transaction data to play with, to provide to the highest bidders, all that ecommerce it would be exposed to and the percentages on the fees for transactions.

Zuckerberg was on the board of Breakthrough Initiatives along with Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner. BI was started by Yuri and Julian Milner in 2015 to seek evidence of life beyond Earth. Interestingly, Yuri found DST Global. Who are they? An asset company hosting $50bn in assets, they specialise in late-stage internet companies. They are a significant player.

Iliad SA is a French company, which is sweet to know the French were being represented on something of significance for once.

David Marcus sat on the Libra board as well ran a digital wallet for Facebook’s new subsidiary Calibra.

Mid-June 2019, there was a press launch and there something misaligned. Zuck does not get that the world perceives him as a creepy, grey lizard with a haunted bowling-pin head and that Facebook, despite its social media dominance, is not well liked. This press launch announces that Libra in astrology signifies justice and in French Libre means “free.”

Freedom. Justice. Money. With this guy…

Trump tweeted how he did not like crypto and Mnunchin uttered that Facebook had a lot to do in order to make the Feds and Regs comfortable.

Chair of the Fed, Powell, was in favour of green lighting it. Yellen was closer to the POTUS Trump as well as Biden, who both did not like crypto nor Zuck respectively.

July 2019, Marcus went to Congress.

Just think for a second that you are The American Government. Some billionaire nerds make a scheme where their coin, which is regulated in Switzerland and the association has a small cabal of shops and credit cards, is going to run the economy. This coin is not just backed by the USD but other currencies too.

I am surprised congress did not just point and laugh for several days, throwing vegetables and heckling like Statler and Waldorf.

A smart man is Marcus but his charm and sense of goodwill was not going to win against the tide of concern, he thought he could schmooze the Feds, let the devs build and we will all be singing songs together in at the Utopia built by Facebook. Instead, he was united both parties for a day and was berated by both sides of the house. “You think you can just walk in here, with all your data, and your non-blinking eyes and just mess with the money? Well?! DID YA?” not verbatim but it was the general gist of it. Libra was told to be put on hold.

This was a wakeup call. The plan was for cordial talks, which would progress the project, then the members of Libra would get together and step up. Now, Association members were fearing political backlash and accusing Facebook of over promoting them. Poor Facebook, if this went well, it was a group effort, if it didn’t - and it didn’t – it was Facebook’s idea and fault, “they made us do it, we are victims,” cried Mastercard et al. What makes me laugh is Farfetch, a luxury fashions company, put Libra front and centre of their website the moment they joined the Association. Then they cry over promotion.

Snakes.

Paypal never showed up to the meeting and the day after announced they were leaving the Libra Association.

Democrats Brown and Schatz wrote to Mastercard, Visa and Strip with a strongly worded threatening letter – strong currency in Washington, the closest thing to a legal drive-by for politicians - about potential backlash if they did not back away from the project.

Many members pulled out including Ebay, Stripe, Visa and Mastercard. The wind was out of Libra’s sails and a new strategy was needed.

Get in top men. Drafted in was Steve Bunnell, who became Libra’s Chief Legal Officer. He was the former Chief of the Criminal Division at US Attorney’s Office and Justice Department Counsel.  A former Chief of Fraud and Public Corruption Section, he achieved General Counsel of US Department of Homeland Security. Whilst he was at Diem, he was also a member of the Council of Foreign Relations.

An aside, on April 7th 2022, Bunnell is featuring at a NAFUSA conference on a panel titled, “Crypto: the good, the bad, the ugly”.

Who is that parachuting through the ceiling, in May 2020, straight into the Chief Executive chair? That’s Stuart Levey. He is the former Treasury Official in charge of US Government’s efforts to stop terrorist funding. He worked under Bush and Obama, one of the few appointees to work for both Republicans and Democrats. There is an asterisk there however, he only worked for Obama for 10 days.

In Al-Bassam’s tweet, he mentions how German banks were pressured by American banks to not provide funds to Iran. It was Levey who brought in the policy for US corporations to impose government-imposed financial measures.

Stuart had the expertise and resume to show he could combat financial crime and money laundering.

Top guys who are well versed in the regulatory game began making the changes. Libra became Diem. David Marcus focussed on Facebook’s digital wallet Novi, meanwhile Morgan Beller left early 2020 for venture capital firm NFX. NFX, along with Balaji Srinivasan and Galaxy**,** have invested in Radicle.XYZ, a fully decentralized code repository. Ramp.network is another  She still held a loose advisory role but her heart was elsewhere. In her own words, “I guess I really love the zero-to-one phases of projects. And with Diem and Novi, we were way past that point.”

Kevin Weil left as well as Simon Morris. Weil is an odd one, he can be found as a co-creator of Libra/Diem but not much is said on his influence. He left for Planet Labs. Morris is currently CSO at ConsenSys.

By June 2020, Catalini was made Chief Economist of the association – to this day, he still is, according to his Linked In, and, what I seem to be relevant, he is a member of the CBDC Engagement Forum at the Bank of England since September 2021.

Levey shrunk the project. Initially, Libra would be backed by a treasury consisting of multiple currencies and safe assets. Diem was to be backed 1-to-1 with the USD. Engineers worked hard to build a system that would track signs of money laundering or sanction breaking as well as devised a way to stop anonymous transactions. From the early days, Catalini spoke of how AI and Machine Learning was applied to aid the Anti-Money laundering technology. This required a great deal of reverse engineering.

As the pandemic hit, meetings with officials were over Zoom and the tedium of combing over precise wording in compliance went on and on. Some agencies did not know of other agencies. However, there was some hope.

Spring 2021 and Catalini was trying to appease Central Banks by saying that CBDCs will replace Diem eventually. He held a presentation saying the association will continue to be a member-run organization with equal voting rights, with no single member maintaining control. Revenue will be made through "very small" transaction fees on basic payments, but in the long run, Catalini said Diem could charge higher fees for added value transactions.

In terms of infrastructure, Diem will rely on local institutions to secure the network. More intermediaries could mean higher transaction fees if each player is taking a cut, but Diem is hoping that at scale, competition among intermediaries to facilitate the payments will tamp down the transaction costs to a figure much lower than legacy structures.

At the time of this presentation, Diem was still awaiting approval from FINMA.

Trials for Novi Wallet were planned to use a small amount of Diem and this required FINMA to approve of Diem’s licence. FINMA brought in over 20 over regulators worldwide to judge and it was approved by all accept… The United States Treasury.

Bastards.

Excuses about allowing Biden time to settle into office were touted. Levey was furious, Dante Disparte – Head of Policy – left in exhaustion and frustration. Fuck it, Levey ordered, we taking this back to America. So, the HQ for Diem was taken from Switzerland to USA. This is where Silvergate bank enter picture, they worked with Diem to help with the Motherlands regulation.

A new launch date was announced in July 2021 and on the eve of the launch, Yellen informed it was to no go ahead. Mark Van Der Wilde told a comprehensive regulatory framework for stablecoins needed to be in place.

Levey did the political version of a drive-by, he wrote a strongly worded letter to Yellen and Powell. All these other stablecoins exist yet go unchecked, meanwhile, Facebook try to establish one and nothing but hassle. Poor Facebook.

Silvergate bowed out.

There was one last phone of the dice. There was a stablecoin that was regulated at state level.

Libra Needed Gemini.

Zuckerberg needed Winklevii.

Diem turned to Gemini for assistance and the NY DFS Superintendent Linda Lacewell welcomed it. There was hope on the horizon. Gemini would release Diem on their exchange. Then Cuomo sexually harassed people – allegedly – and his office left town, Lacewell included.

Another exhausted roll of the dice came when Marcus tried to launch Novi and trial it with the Paxos dollar. Once again Congress came in to halt proceedings.

Dejected and without hope, Levey announced Diem was going to be sold in December 2021. Zuck was tired of the negative attention the project kept bring to the Facebook name. January 31st, Silvergate bought the assets under Diem and Novi staffers were told to focus on how digital currency will work with Meta’s metaverse.

Catalini wrote in a post, “A senior US regulator informed us that Diem was the best-designed stablecoin project the USG had seen, and the President's Working Group framework validated our design. Through economic research, we raised the bar for stablecoin reserve and consumer protection standards.”

An idea is the most resilient parasite. One that has nestled in with all that ambition, advancement, work and ego, is it simply going to end there?

I am going to list this mans career. It is significant.

KPMG – Senior Associate, June 2007 – Nov 2010

Royal Bank of Canada Capital Markets - Senior Analyst Oct 2010 – Sept 2012

Black Rock - Real Estate Associate, Aug 2012 – June 2014

ClearBridge Investments – REIT Analyst, June 2015 – Aug 2015

Abraaj Group – Private Equity Associate, Aug 2015 – Oct 2015

Boston Consulting Group – Consultant, Sept 2016 – Aug 2017

ConsenSys – Director of Strategy, Sept 2017 – May 2020

Meridio – Founder, CEO, October 2017 – May 2020

Meta – Strategic Partnerships, May 2020 – Dec 2021

Stealth – Board Member, March 2021 – Present

Techstars – Advisor, Sept 2018 – Present

R3 – Advisor, May 2020 – Present

Hunter College – June 2021 – Present

Bank Prov – Member Board of Directors, Jan 2022 – Present

Aptos – Co-founder & CEO, Dec 2021 – Present

Holy shit. His first job is at KPMG and the man takes temp jobs as a REIT analysis. This man is an advisor to R3. I need to highlight this as R3 is important. It originated as 9 major banks deciding to build a consortium dedicated to the design and deployment of DLT for monetary transfer. David Rutter is a founder and chief executive for R3.

A thing call Six Digital Exchange (SDX) have permission from FINMA – something Diem did not achieve – to operate a stock exchange and a central securities depository for digital assets in Switzerland. SDX are using Corda, which is software formed under R3.

SDX global partners network is Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, OMFIF, R3, WEF, InterWork Alliance, ISSA, Global Digital Finance, F10, Global Blockchain Business Council, Chamber of Digital Commerce.

This is important to keep a check on as these people and organisations are crucial in the CBDC movement.

FQX have made the E-Note, this is an electronic promissory note. It is based on DLPC (BAFT) and Delaware law, the benefit of the eNote is its global transferability. FQX has struck a deal with SDX. The idea here is Switzerland is the incubator for major and central blockchain systems, and ecosystem, to help break open the liquidity silos that formulate in the current legacy systems.

Corda is an open-source, Java-centric, private blockchain. Who uses it? CitiBank, Banco Bradesco, MetLife, Inc., China Merchants Bank, BNP Paribas S.A., between them that is roughly $329,270,000,000 between them in revenue. There is also AWS, Nasdaq, Accenture, Deon Digital, who are featured partners.

R3’s Corda is the software it is being built on. Shaikh is now an advisor to R3. Shaikh has co-created a Layer 1 that can do around 160,000 TPS.

R3 raised $107mm in investment from its initial 18 month opening, after being founded in 2013 (or 2015 depending on your source) by Rutter and Todd McDonald. Rutter’s approach to banks was cautious and led with cost saving, whilst Facebook came in, what Rutter remarked, naively and ridiculously stupid. His reasoning was because they wondered into a highly-regulated industry with no idea how to navigate it, and that was evident in their outcome.

At Facebook, Shaikh was perhaps given a great opportunity and salary to build on his work and ideas but it is with his connections and influence at R3 is where he will see more traction to his work. Having Rutter rather than Zucker is going to further his ambition for a Layer 1 for Every 1.

An aside, the head of Galaxy Digital, Tim Grant, is the head of SDX.

Aptos loosely translated to English means “where two streams meet.” Why pick this name for the project? It could be in reference to Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching being credited as co-founders of Aptos. Two great minds meet. It could be referencing that the transaction execution is decoupled from the consensus protocol. Together, this provides, by current standards, a highly scalable, ridiculously fast, composable protocol. The ambition behind the project is to be used by billions of users.

Avery Ching worked at Novi and is considered a co-creator of the Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus protocol deployed on the Diem blockchain.

Avery Ching and Mo Shaikh have launched Aptos. I will paste Shaikh’s own words on the project:

“Since departing Meta (formerly Facebook) we have been able to put our ideas into motion, ditch bureaucratic red tape, and build an entirely new network from the ground up that brings them to fruition. We’re now ready to socialize those ideas more broadly and start shipping the infrastructure that we’ve been perfecting.

“Aptos will be built in part on the technology we developed in the open over the past three years. Aptos is using Move, the safe and reliable language originally developed for Diem. The ideas we conceived then are still relevant and will serve as an important foundation for a safe, scalable, upgradable Web3. Our plans for decentralization and permissionless access are progressing quickly and will be developed in the open.

“… My cofounder, Avery Ching, is one of the world’s leading experts in building distributed systems and scaling them for billions of users. The rest of the founding team at Aptos consists of an impressive group of PhDs, researchers, engineers, designers and strategists including Alden Hu, Alin Tomescu, Dahlia Malkhi , David Wolinsky, Greg Nazario, Jake Skinner, Josh Lind, Max Kaplan, Mo Ahmed, Neil Harounian, Rati Gelashivili, Rustie Lin, Sasha Spiegelman, Sherry Xiao, Sital Kedia and Zekun Li.

“…It is the lowest latency, optimistically-responsive BFT protocol available, and it features a robust, on-chain reputation system and novel methods for parallel execution — a key enabler of speed at scale. We will rapidly deploy many key innovations in performance, functionality and improvements to the overall user experience and leverage our ability to do major upgrades seamlessly in the process.”

Avery Ching puts:

“Our team has developed a production-grade, low latency Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) engine. We have implemented our fourth iteration of the protocol (the most advanced HotStuff derivative) over the past three years. During that time, we have upgraded the consensus protocol in a private mainnet environment with a diverse set of operators and zero downtime. Our first implementation of the BFT protocol added an active pacemaker that used timeouts to synchronize validators much more quickly than waiting for increasing timeouts. With our latest improvement to the protocol, blocks are committed in as few as two network round-trips, making sub-second finality the common case. Our novel reputation system analyzes the on-chain state and automatically updates leader rotations to adjust for non-responsive validators without any human intervention, making it well suited for decentralized environments. Furthermore, our protocol clearly separates liveness from safety. No matter if the network is unreachable or the non-safety core is compromised in some way, the chain will not fork as long as the BFT honesty guarantees are upheld. The safety of our consensus protocol has been both audited and formally verified.

“…our research on a family of DAG based consensus protocols (i.e. All You Need Is DAG, Narwhal and Tusk: A DAG-based Mempool and Efficient BFT Consensus and Bullshark: DAG BFT Protocols Made Practical) demonstrate that this class of protocols can range from 125,000 to 160,000 tps or even beyond. However, these throughput numbers do not represent end-to-end blockchain throughput as they only take into account consensus, network, and partial storage considerations. They do not factor in other important considerations such as transaction execution times, account access patterns, or authenticated data structures (e.g. Merkle trees) in a production blockchain. On the finality side, block times often get mistaken for finality when in fact, block times are an input factor to finality.”

The Aptos blockchain history taken from their Medium:

The Aptos technology stack was researched, designed, and developed by a 30+ person crypto platform research and engineering team with domain expertise and PhDs in consensus, cryptography, distributed systems, formal verification, security, etc. The codebase has grown substantially over 3+ years with 292 unique developers and dozens of community driven improvement proposals. It was battle-tested in a production environment through a number of different use cases and operated by numerous enterprise operators for over a year with over a dozen possible disaster scenarios. We conducted multiple successful significant upgrades in a private mainnet with zero downtime. The codebase is open source and community governed with a long-term goal to build infrastructure that can be used for many networks. The community is ready and excited to see this technology ship and unlock many new applications going forward.

2022 Q1 (March 15th) — Developer testnet launch

Work with strategic partners and the web3 developer community to gather feedback and make improvements with respect to the Move developer experience and Move language

2022 Q2 — Incentivized testnet launch

A larger and mainnet-like test playground for strategic partners and web3 developers to build

Work with the node operator community to onboard and build expertise on operating the decentralized network together

Start a bug bounty to improve the developer experience, node operations, and address infrastructure issues

Provide incentive alignment for all participants that help secure the network

2022 Q3 — Mainnet launch

2022 Q4–2023 Q1 — Deploy the next major release to Aptos mainnet with the next set of significant features

Anchorage Digital, BNB Chain, Blockorus, Coinbase, Livepeer, Moonclave, Paymagic, Paxos, Rarible, Streaming Fast are building on Aptos currently.

Sam double-majored in Computer Science and Philosophy from Williams College and earned a PhD in Programming Languages from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has co-authored 18 papers to date. After being a research intern for Microsoft, and a stop as a research assistant at University of Colorado, Blackshear was at Facebook from 2015 until 2018 when he was promoted to Principal Engineer of Novi.

Blackshear is a static analyser is, by the accounts I have read and judging by the legacy of his work, he is very good at it. He developed bug finding tools and is an exceptionally smart person, with keen academic interest in philosophy, mathematics and computer science. Facebook were impressed by him and after joining in 2015, he created Infer, the bug tool, static analyser, for Facebook.

This was some what of a pioneer move. Other companies now employ teams of static analysers. A good analogy I read for a static analyser is consider the blueprint to a building. Sometimes, it is when the building is created, people find out there was something wrong with the blue print. So, you need someone to be able to see errors in the blueprint. If you swap blueprint with code and you have a static analyser.

Under the Diem project, he was the Maintainer of Move and the Move VM, which he co-created. He was the first person to work on Move and the team blossomed. The aim of the Move language is to provide a smart-contract programming language that allows users to write programs that manage and transfer assets while providing extremely trustworthy protection against sophisticated attacks – with the added caveat of having high TPS that is capable of taking on billions of users.

Sam says himself, “I am a dyed-in-the-wool functional programmer and my favourite programming language, besides Move, is Camel… the accounts you are doing on account-based blockchains is inherently Imperative, and that is why we work with Imperative.” Imperative is a programming-language that uses statements to change a programme’s state. It is a kinder approach that unpacking the global situation of the blockchain and them packing it back into the chain, which is more what Solidity does.

The Bytecode language is deployed on chain, the source language is what users interact with, this is nice to users and Sam states this is more of a soft-science, a social science. The hard-science is with bytecode is where the safety is, the low-level guarantees. They comply together.

It was November 2021 when he co-founded Mysten Labs.

He did a talk on 0L discord about Move and Sui and 0L but I bloody missed it.

Like our boy Sam, Evan joined Facebook in 2015 as Director of Engineering, he had worked the previous 10 years at Apple. In September 2021, he tweeted, “Going all in. Doing something new in crypto”, then a month later Mysten Labs was founded.

As of June 15, 2021, he invested in Parsiq, who in turn invested in Metis.

Reasons Chang joined the crypto world from the Apple-universe is down to three reasons.

Crypto and blockchain are highly efficient ways to model and transfer assets. He enjoys the technical challenge. Lastly, he likes the energy of the space, the mavericks, the pioneers, the collaboration, has attracted him to the arena.

He has built large scale systems and tools that are accessible to users, he also considers getting funding in the space easy due to the immediacy of getting the money back, unlike other areas of tech. He mentions how early we are as the mainstream still lacks the understanding of the potential and see crypto as a scam.

Aptos may have raised $200mm in an investment round but Mysten Labs has raised $3. Fuck me. At first I thought, it is just a typo, I open the video and the computer voice says $3 too. It must be true! Evan Chang really went out there and brought the bacon to the butty.

In reality, ML raised $36M in funding from a16z and Coinbase Ventures in December 2021.

Evans spoke of how it was a grind working with regulators at Diem. He believes there is a good chance the project will not succeed due to nuanced regulation that Facebook cannot overcome. The transition to Web 3 is going to be costly and in the way is programmability and scalability. ML is aiming to build the infrastructure for Web 3.0. They are developing the engineering components that will used in product construction for clients.

Narwhal, a high-performance memory pool, or mempool, also known as transaction pool. This has been developed in partnership with Celo and Sommelier. This can be integrated with any BFT protocol, for example Aptos Layer 1. Move language is going to be used for Celo and Sommelier.

This will enable the open source payment network Celo to achieve a throughput of more than 140,000 TPS despite global network delays. The Move language will bring smart contracts to Cosmos.

The Narwhal & Tusk BFT Protocol paper just best paper at EuroSys. From arxiv.org, “Composing Narwhal with a partially synchronous consensus protocol (Narwhal-HotStuff) yields significantly better throughput even in the presence of faults or intermittent loss of liveness due to asynchrony. However, loss of liveness can result in higher latency. To achieve overall good performance when faults occur we design Tusk, a zero-message overhead asynchronous consensus protocol, to work with Narwhal. We demonstrate its high performance under a variety of configurations and faults. As a summary of results, on a WAN, Narwhal-Hotstuff achieves over 130,000 tx/sec at less than 2-sec latency compared with 1,800 tx/sec at 1-sec latency for Hotstuff. Additional workers increase throughput linearly to 600,000 tx/sec without any latency increase. Tusk achieves 160,000 tx/sec with about 3 seconds latency. Under faults, both protocols maintain high throughput, but Narwhal-HotStuff suffers from increased latency.”

To read the paper, here is the link: https://sonnino.com/papers/narwhal-and-tusk.pdf

Narwhal has been experimented on AWS, which is on page 9 of the paper under “Evaluation”.

This may be of interest, taken from page 11/12, the paper highlights how it out performs previous systens such as Quorum-based systems, such Hyperledger Fabric and Corda:

“However, performance under attack is 0 20k 40k 60k 80k 100k 120k Throughput (tx /s) 0.0 5.0 10.0 15.0 20.0 25.0 30.0 35.0 40.0 Latency (s) Tusk, 10 nodes (1 faulty) Tusk, 10 nodes (3 faulty) Narwhal-HS, 10 nodes (1 faulty) Narwhal-HS, 10 nodes (3 faulty) Batched-HS, 10 nodes (1 faulty) Batched-HS, 10 nodes (3 faulty) Baseline-HS, 10 nodes (1 faulty) Baseline-HS, 10 nodes (3 faulty) Figure 8. Comparative throughput-latency under faults. WAN measurements with 10 validators, using 1 worker collocated with the primary. One and three faults, 500KB max. block size and 512B transaction size. much contested. Early work suggests that specially crafted attacks can degrade the performance of PBFT consensus systems massively, to such a lower performance point that liveness guarantees are meaningless. Recent work targeting PBFT in Hyperledger Fabric corroborates these results and shows latency grows from a few seconds to a few hundred seconds, just through blocks being delayed. Han et al. report similar dramatic performance degradation in cases of simple node crash failure for a number of quorum-based systems namely Hyperledger Fabric, Ripple and Corda. In contrast, we demonstrate that Narwhal combined with a traditional consensus mechanism, such as HotStuff maintains its throughput under attack, with increased latency.”

In a conclusion on page 9, “…In one sentence, Narwhal and Tusk conclusively prove that the main cost of large-scale blockchain protocols is not consensus but the reliable transaction dissemination. Yet, dissemination alone, without global sequencing, is an embarrassingly parallelizable function, as we show with the scale-out design of Narwhal. Our work supports a rethinking in how distributed ledgers and SMR systems are architected, towards pairing a mempool, like Narwhal, to ensure high-throughput even under faults and asynchrony, with a consensus mechanism to achieve low-latency for fixed-size messages. Tusk demonstrates that there exists a zero-message overhead consensus for Narwhal, secure under full asynchrony. As a result, quorum-based blockchains can scale to potentially millions of transactions per second through scale-out for payments or to build generic reliable systems through state machine replication and smart contracts.”

Move Prover is another tool developed by Mysten Labs. Changes in the Diem framework must be successfully verified before being integrated into the open source repository on GitHub, which Move Prover helps verify if a smart contract will work.

For a company that has launched officially in December, they have provided a lot in a few months, already launching their testnet. This has happened due to the work that was done at Diem. Blackshear et al authored a paper called “Move Prover” back in 2020.

The company is 50 people strong with people from Google, Apple, Facebook involved. A goal is to build technology that is not owned by one company. They work with Sommelier, Celo and Cosmos so far.

Team: Evan Cheng

Co-Founder, CEO

Adeniyi Abiodun

Co-Founder, CPO

Sam Blackshear

Co-Founder, CTO

George Danezis

Co-Founder, Chief Scientist

Kostas Chalkias

Co-Founder, Chief Cryptographer

Carries on Libra’s ideal of a fair launch, that no tokens are given to VC’s, and there is no pre-mine. It has taken the great work from Diem with some changes. They have moved it into a permissionless environment. On Diem, any account could be frozen so this was removed. It can also make autopayments possible.

It is a collective work. The validators donate 50% of their rewards to the community wallets and those community wallets will be used to fund the project activities.

With Mysten Labs, they are currently running join hackathons as a way to incentivise and expose developers to Move.

Zaki Manian is credited as a contributor to 0L.

Mustafa Al-Bassam is the CEO of Celestia. Now, he was never a part of Libra but he was a part of the projects with the people that went into Libra.

Celestia claims to be working towards a new paradigm in blockchain design. Which boasts to be the first modular blockchain and if I am honest, I don’t know what the fuck that means. A tweet from Polyna says, “[Celestia is] the ‘first data availability sampling layer’ - although conceived first, both Polygon Avail and Celestia claim to be launching around a similar timeframe (late 2022, early 2023). Wish the best to both.”

Further, the first chain in the modular paradigm", in which case it would be Loopring which went live on mainnet in Feb 2020 and there is an argument for Plasma.

All I can say that is “Sure”.

This is the consensus algorithm that is underneath the BFT for Libra. In Hotstuff, a node sends a message directly to the Leader rather than the mesh communication method.

This is from a thread by Crypto Swim. CEO of Oasis Labs, Dawn Song, and Sam Blackshear spoke about a responsible data economy.

The first image is from Oasis whitepaper stating how HotStuff, which can replace the Oasis consensus algorithm. Above is the Diem whitepaper, which shows the consensus algorithm is HotStuff.

The appeal of HotStuff is the high throughput, low latency, be efficient, highly secure, and flexible.

One of Novi Labs industrial partners was IC3, Dawn Song used to be the Co-Director of IC3.

Oasis is backed by a16z, Accel (Breyer), Pantera and Polychain Capital.

If you dig into anything regarding payment system goals, CBDCs, DLTs and Central Banks, the point of running a monetary network 24/7 will arise. Currently, banks operating systems run 40 hours a week.

SEN – the Silvergate Exchange Network – allows its users to move money around via digital currency 24/7.

They have three investors:

CMT Digital Group, they have a basic, poor choice in colour, website that is still in construction. They are a part of CMT Group.

Strandview Capital. They only invest in a few projects, which are along the lines of mortgage providers, medical insurance, a small bank.

Then there is Digital Currency Group. This is the lead investor of Silvergate. They also invest in Greyscale,

Glenn Hutchins is a co-founder of DCG and he was a board member of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as well as being many other things, Hutchins was a special advisor to Bill Clinton.

Co-founder Barry Silbert also founded SecondMarket, this was a liquid asset marketplace that went onto be acquired by NASDAQ in 2015. An article featured on Verizon from 8 years ago, Silbert spoke of how Facebook will have remittances, it will become the go-to platform for e-payments.

On its board advisors is Larry fucking Summers.

The board of Silvergate host people who have worked for banks such as HSBC, KMPG, Citigroup, DSF Management Corporation, Goldman Sachs, Andreessen Horowitz. Aanchal Gupta is VP and she worked at Novi.  Michael Lempres is Andreessen’s man on the inside. Lempres became the Chairman of the Board from June 2021 onwards, which is coincidently is when a16z announced a $2.2bn fund for crypto and just in time for the diaspora of Diem. People like Evan Chang and Shaikh were formulating their latest endeavours that continued the legacy of their work under Facebook. And Marc Andreessen ‘loses’ Lempres to Silvergate, who are reported to have purchased Diem’s technology assets for around $182mm.

You don’t get to this level without having a chess-like mind.

This man works hard and is well connected. He advises or has advised and invested in Saudi Arabia, Facebook, Twitter, Ebay, Skype, Airbnb, Sky Mavis (Axie Infinity), multiple start-ups, he is massive in the high married into Laura Arrillaga – the daughter of John Arrillaga. John, who passed away January 2022, who invested early into semiconductors and high-end tech, he ended up being one of the largest landowners in Silicon Valley. On paper, Andreesen seems the perfect son-in-law for John, and John the perfect father-in-law.

From 2006 to 2022, Andreesen and Horowitz went from $40mm invested all the way to $28.2bn in held in assets under the firm. Chris Dixon reports that the crypto fund is around $3bn- $4.5bn. Chris Dixon and Katie Huan are the dedicated minds to A ‘n’ H’s crypto fund.

The crypto fund is too big to be silo’ed and will be folded back into the central funds. One of Marc’s top skills is recognising talent and he was a keen reader of Dixon’s blog and decided to bring him into the Venture Capital game. Dixon has gone on to provide great return on investments for the firm.

Andreesen and Horowitz do not just provide funding for teams and projects, they provide a network and help them recruit. Marc said founders tend to get supplanted by professional CEO’s because the professionals have spent years making connections in an industry whereas the founder has spent most of their time creating. He aims to help founders attempt to bridge that gap.

As he sits on the board of Facebook, now Meta of course, he was highly influential in the Diem process and his connections have helped bring people into the project. He is still influential in managing the project post-Facebook, with Silvergate in his pocket, funding Mysten and Aptos, ensuring the legacy remains close to him.

“From the outset, the Diem project has been focused on leveraging the benefits of blockchain technology to design a better and more inclusive payment system. The members of the Diem Association and our outstanding team pursued this vision with determination and perseverance, motivated by the desire to deliver substantial benefits to consumers and businesses, along with a payments solution for those who are currently underserved or excluded altogether from the traditional financial system.

We are proud of the work that the Association, our partners, and our team have done. This has included building and testing a blockchain-based payment system with industry-leading controls to protect consumers and combat financial crime, that is intended to be safe for people making ordinary day-to-day payments.

One of our highest priorities in designing the Diem Payment Network was building in controls to protect it against misuse by illicit actors. We addressed that concern in ways that are novel in the industry, implementing numerous controls that were recognized as innovative by regulators. Among these controls was a prohibition on anonymous transactions, which pose both a sanctions and money laundering risk.

As we undertook this effort, we actively sought feedback from governments and regulators around the world, and the project evolved substantially and improved as a result. In the United States, a senior regulator informed us that Diem was the best-designed stablecoin project the US Government had seen.

We are gratified that the subsequent Report on Stablecoins issued by the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets validated many of Diem’s core design features. Those features address not only the risks related to the issuance of a stablecoin, but also the risks associated with transferring stablecoins between parties.

Despite giving us positive substantive feedback on the design of the network, it nevertheless became clear from our dialogue with federal regulators that the project could not move ahead. As a result, the best path forward was to sell the Diem Group’s assets, as we have done today to Silvergate.

We remain confident in the potential for a stablecoin operating on a blockchain designed like Diem’s to deliver the benefits that motivated the Diem Association from the beginning. With today’s sale, Silvergate will be well-placed to take this vision forward. Over the coming weeks, the Diem Association and its subsidiaries expect to begin the process of winding down, but we look forward to seeing the design choices – and the ideals –

of Diem thrive.”

Eric Zabinski, Eric Geffner, Ashleigh Stanley, David Johnson, and Sarah Levesque at O’Melveny & Myers LLP, Stuart Levi and Mana Ghaemmaghami at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, and Mark Jansen and Meghan Kloeber at Fenwick & West LLP served as Diem’s legal advisors. Eric Risley and Peter Stoneberg at Architect Partners LLC served as financial advisors to Diem. Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC served as financial advisor to Silvergate and Holland & Knight served as Silvergate’s legal advisor.

Facebook could not get Libra/Diem through due to the tough regulatory landscape and their own naivety. They did develop and incubate great talent and technology. It may seem they have lost control of this but under the Association there were founding members with equal say. Now, the project has been broken up and sifted through Silvergate,

If you consider the people behind Facebook – Breyer, Marc Andreessen, In-Q-Tel, The Mongols – this is more of a fluid project. This is not as straightforward as once upon a time Zuckerberg and his orcs decided to make a digital currency. No. It seems to me it is a part of a broader plan and goal and Facebook was the ideal conduit to try and move that plan and goal through it.

The whole surveillance of money, having Facebook as an intermediary for finance is perfect considering the purpose of In-Q-Tel having Facebook was to record everything about a person. It just did not go fully to plan.

Finance loves liquidity and no borders, especially those involved in crypto-economics. The brightest minds adapt for they appreciate life is not going as according to plan as first hoped but it doesn’t mean you should stop after the first hurdle. It isn’t that Facebook failed, it just needs to adjust. So far Facebook has played its part and now the project/ideas/action need to flow where they can thrive.

As Andreessen said, you need to have goals that are set and determined but your tactics need to be very, very flexible. “It takes a decade or more to build something significant,” in his own words.

Over the course of attempts to adapt and change payment systems, start-ups happen and get absorbed, or the plan did not take off due to the tech. Ideas are fluid and love active minds. Culture is a battleground for ideas to see which come out on top and the arsenal and personnel that are behind the ideas of tech of Diem is quite substantial.

This project is causing a brain drain in the “old” Big Tech of Apple, Microsoft and Google.

Pay attention to what these people do.

You know this, I know this, the goal posts are being moved for the global financial system and a new world is squirming out from the old world. You create things that make the old world obsolete. From the first bronze sword to blockchain.

Mo Shaikh’s words:

“We are the founders, researchers, designers, and builders of Diem, the first blockchain developed for this purpose… while the rest of the world never saw what we produced, our job is far from done”

David Marcus - He sold his first company at 27. In 2011, a subsequent mobile payments start-up he founded, called Zong, was acquired by PayPal for $240mn. Within nine months, he was PayPal’s president. In 2014, Zuckerberg recruited him to run Messenger, which he’d help grow to more than 1.3bn users.

Learned basic computer coding at age 8.

Sam Blackshear – Talented and tall static analysis who created the Move programming language.

Mo Shaikh – Co-founder of Aptos, worked with top companies.

Avery Chang - worked at Novi and is considered a co-creator of the Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus protocol deployed on the Diem blockchain.

Dante Disparte – Now Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Global Policy for Circle, a member of the World Economic Forum’s Digital Currency Governance Consortium. Background in risk and security advisory.

Christian Catalini – Head economist of Meta Fintech, Member of CBDC Engagement Forum for Bank of England.

Saumya Bhasvar -  a Credit Suisse banker Libra hired as a legal expert.

Calibra – A subsidiary of Facebook. Was headed by David Marcus, charged to create a wallet to connect crypto users to Facebook. It was renamed Novi.

Diogo Mónica – co-founder and President of Anchorage, the crypto arm of Andreessen Horowitz.

Scott Kupor - leading the helm as Managing Partner and CEO of Andreessen Horowitz.

Joe Lallouz – Etsy founder, founded Bison Trail, which he is CEO of, and it is a blockchain infrastructure platform. Runs on Algorand, Tezos, Decred.

Bison Trail – Blockchain Infrastructure platform. Node operator of Oasis protocol.

DST Global - a venture capital and private equity firm that primarily invests in late-stage internet companies. Estimated $50bn under management. Founded by Yuri Milner.

Neville Crawley – CEO of Kiva.

Goldman Sachs – served as financial and legal advisors to Silvergate in the Diem process.

Evan Cheng – Worked at Apple, was a director at Novi Research, co-founded Mysten Labs

Dahlia Malkhi – CTO of Diem Association - Novi

IC3 – Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts

Fred Ehrsam – Co-Founder of Paradigm. Paradigm is a member of Diem association and Fred Ehrsam is an investor of Oasis in a Series A round of funding. Fred and Andreessen are the two largest shareholders of Class A Coinbase stock.

Olaf Carlson-Wee – First Employee of Coinbase, started Polychain Capital.

George Danezis – Franco-Greco, key developer in the Coconut Protocol. Libra incorporated a lot of his ideas. He works with Sui now. Co-founder and Chief Scientist of Mysten Labs.

“Coconut is a novel selective disclosure credential scheme supporting distributed threshold issuance, public and private attributes, re-randomization, and multiple unlinkable selective attribute revelations. Coconut integrates with blockchains to ensure confidentiality, authenticity and availability even when a subset of credential issuing authorities are malicious or offline. We implement and evaluate a generic Coconut smart contract library for Chainspace and Ethereum; and present three applications related to anonymous payments, electronic petitions, and distribution of proxies for censorship resistance. Coconut uses short and computationally efficient credentials, and our evaluation shows that most Coconut cryptographic primitives take just a few milliseconds on average, with verification taking the longest time (10 milliseconds).”

Sui - A permissionless proof-of-stake blockchain network being developed by Evan Cheng, Sam Blackshear, Adeniyi Abiodun, and George Danezis

Mustafa Al-Bassam – Iraqi-British computer prodigy, co-founder of LulsSec in 2011. He and others compromised a number of high profile organizations and corporations, including Sony, Fox, News International, Nintendo and the CIA.  His last Linked In role is with Nym as an advisor. CEO of Celestia.

Celestia claims to be working towards a new paradigm in blockchain design.

Dave Hrycyszyn – London living Canadian. He is a co-author of the blockchain-sharding protocol Chainspace and the leaderless, PBFT-variant consensus protocol Blockmania, the prototype of which turned out to be likely the world’s fastest distributed ledger (400,000 TPS with 2 secs finality), garnering interest from Facebook’s Libra. Dave briefly went to Libra with the rest of the Chainspace team before leaving to become Nym’s CTO.

He worked on (and wrote the book on) the open-source Scalatra microframework, used to build parts of NetFlix, the BBC's Linked Data project, and McLaren's high-speed timeseries data store. Previously, as CTO at a London-based agile software consultancy, he led major development projects for many large organisations and startups.

Balaji Srinivasan -  former chief technology officer of Coinbase and former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

Kevin Weil – June 2018 – 2021 April, VP of Product Novi; co-creator Diem (fka Libra).  May 2009 – Feb 2016, SVP Product Twitter. VP Product at Instagram May 2016 – June 2018. Board Member of Strava Nov 2016 – Present. Team Member on Council on Foreign Relations June 2019 – Present.

Chris Dixon - He is now a general partner of Andreesen Horowitz and runs their Crypto Fund with Katie Haun. He topped Forbes Midas Touch 2022 list, He has led the funding rounds for Coinbase and OpenSea, Yuga Labs. Dixon is not a fan of Facebook, he even says, “we are going to do everything we can to replace them with a new set of companies”. He taught himself to code. Took a job as a developer at a hedge fund.

He cofounded SiteAdvisor and within a year, McAfee bought up the business. He cofounded Hunch, which was bought by Ebay. He has a blog piece from 2010 that is a defence of NFTs 10 years before NFTs. He bought Kitty no.15 right at the start of Crypto Kitty.

He invested it in Oculus and begrudgingly sold it to Facebook due to the investment the project needed. Samsung were the only company going to make the specialised screens but it required $1bn investment.