Hello,

I am Garrette and I am a candidate to be an Emissary Prime. I fit an intersection between technical fundamentals, economics, and law.

Parallel was first sent to me by @bitcoinpalmer because of an inside joke that I am a wizard. Gaffer fit the bill of wizardry and Palmer and I being strange weird gem hunters, began to write lore for the cards. Eventually, this lore was considered hilarious and the team (rightfully so) and some of the team and I became friends.

I have no equity interest in Parallel. Although an early adoptooooor, I am not emphasizing myself as a community member in the sense of the ‘composition of the echelon foundation’ – there are a lot of community members. I am more interested in the intersection of law, finance, and decentralized application and this is where I have spent a decent amount of time.

How do you *conceive* Parallel? And why should you be Emissary? You don’t even have that many Twitter followers.

Parallel is a crazy fucking thing. Parallel made an IP powerhouse with three main types of financial instrumentation: equity, cards-as-assets, and the $PRIME token. Parallel has established Echelon, which feels like it is primarily a legal abstraction to straddle the world of enterprise entertainment and decentralized gaming. This is an absolute necessity and optimizes the interests of all parties in a clever way. For instance, we probably can’t have Echelon vote for the director of a hypothetical Parallel movie and similarly, we can’t have equity investors pulling strings on the dApp development or on open-source protocols and other games that may use the $PRIME token.

In order to simply exist, Parallel has a relatively sophisticated corporate structure, legal counsel, and mechanism design to balance the assets I mentioned above. I know this space pretty well. I know what it takes to align lawmakers, investors, and application/network participants. I have spent the better part of ten years in the digital asset industry and in some cases made an incredible impact. I can summarize my background using circles:

The Emissary Prime positions are inherently interdisciplinary. I am not a J.D. but I have in some extreme cases, contributed to legal precedent in the industry. I am not a high-frequency trader, but I know a bit about how finance functions. I am not a world-class blockchain architect, but I have shipped decentralized applications and blockchains. I have never created a world-class brand, but I was an early advocate for tokenization of intellectual property and have some IP myself. In order for the future of Parallel to be optimized, there need to be people involved with the Echelon Foundation who comprehend Parallel as a decentralized protocol, a corporation, a brand, and as a beacon for web3.

+5 Mechanism Design

+4 Shippoorrrr

+4 Financial optimization

Parallel is a complex machine and it will face challenges around scaling on ETH, it will face challenges on community fund allocation, it will face challenges on metadata, and it will face challenges on people trying to break the shit out of the game. People will be crazy. That’s just how blockchains are and it is why we have things like 51% attacks and BFT.

In cryptoland, tech and finance are merged and the behavior of actors needs to be mapped and risks need to be assessed. I have done this for about as long as Dapps and sovereign chains have existed. And as to elaborate on specific contributions that are more modernized, I have worked @regen_network (strong Earthen vibes), @laconicnetwork, and @ratiofinance. Regen Network in particular was interesting because they helped develop the Cosmos SDK and have what I am pretty sure is the first 501(C)(3) for a blockchain in the US.

I choose these three because of their versatility. You will probably note that a carbon credit tokenization protocol, a blockchain querying protocol, and a collateralization risk scoring application have little to do with one another. But, all things in cryptoland are interdisciplinary and require diverse skillsets (for instance, later we will see how law and finance and law and blockchain are kind of the same).

My job is typically to connect dots and find sustainable economic models. In other words, interesting people call me to help align economic incentives for networks and consider how the positions of actors in a system may behave. I have also dabbled in AMM research, made some very early suggestions to // economic design,  and have supported other DeFi protocols that needn’t be named here.

On grander, L1 scales, I worked on Prop 34 which was a massive community initiative to the Cosmos Hub where we spent eight figures of capital for the betterment of the protocol via marketing and education.

I know things. I have pretty much spent my entire “career” in cryptoland and have advised on managing adversarial environments, optimizing the infrastructure and econ of all sorts of stuff, and am not a narc.

+5 Diplomacy with Gods

+5 Financial engineering

+Flame of constellation prize

To just get to it, Parallel had to make very careful considerations about how $PRIME is distributed. There is no doubt that the path up to here has been masterful but there is a disjoint in the responsibilities of the core team and the Echelon foundation.

Echelon will have to act within the confines of the law and in a way that is for the betterment of all parties involved with the brand. This means negotiating with proposals that may require significant legal backgrounds and financial engineering experience. Echelon will need people to sit in between equity investors, token investors, cardholders, gamers, and newcomers.

Accepting some of the previous section for blockchain madness, I have actually contributed to US case law around commodity-based ETF’s. for 1.5 years I worked with the SEC to approve a Bitcoin ETF in the US. Meaning I was a part of a group that applied for an ETF. It was a noble quest requiring me to work with the SEC to fulfill requirements for (potential) approval.

The details are rough. The SEC is a big place. I worked primarily with the divisions of Corporate Finance, Trading and Markets, and the Department of Economic Risk Analysis. I’ve submitted quantitative research on the Bitcoin trading microstructure and had to quite literally review case law as it was written with regards to international digital asset use. Ultimately, we were denied which resulted in a dissenting statement from Commissioner Peirce.

If you read the files, you will note significant mathematical and financial properties in the consideration of the decision. I am choosing to emphasize this experience because I had to merge my background in distributed networks with financial engineering and eventually policy.

Even before this, I worked with governments to discuss esoteric topics like if miners are money transmitters or just computers that solve arbitrarily hard math. And on one extremely exotic occasion, I worked with a US Intelligence agency and I am not allowed to talk about that.

For decentralized finance and law experience: I’ve helped write probably a dozen whitepapers and communicated with general counsels.

I am insane and tried to put Bitcoin on NYSE and worked with the SEC, CFTC and NYSE to attempt to demonstrate hardcore risk assessments and network effects to build case law.

+4 Pedantic nonsense

+5 Tech case law

+5 Corporate Structuring

There will be proposals put forth to Echelon that will require a skillet of technical navigation with regards to the law. There will be important decisions that will need to be made around the game and the growth of $PRIME. There will be years and years of trailblazing. I believe my prior experience helps that and them sum.

Kind of already notated, honestly. For example, finance law and tech law are different things 90% of the time however in blockchain finance and tech are kind of the same thing. Because.. you trade the network. It’s sort of like having a ‘share’ of the internet. Or a gallon of internet oil.

Anyway, I worked on the ETF because as early as 2017 I helped write PPM’s for crypto hedge funds. If you do not know, a PPM is the rules for investing in a fund and establish the legal relationships between investors and investor management. It’s basically the constitution except instead of America it’s a multinational corporation. I help pen constitutions for multinational corporations in my spare time to ensure regional compliance and financial optimization.

In particular with PPM’s,  I specialized in risk sections and corporate structuring to ensure jurisdictional oversight and accounting standards were appropriate for onshore and offshore entities. Parallel has this. Echelon will need to act on behalf of it.

This is somewhat of ac challenging section to write because of my belief that finance and tech end up in the same realm here. i.e omg is a Cosmos validator reward a dividend or is it the creation of property? etc etc. But I felt it was important to include an intersection of law and technical oversight and suggest that it is disjoint from financial engineering in some senses.

Garrette make tech make sense for lawyers and create multi-national corporations to protec creators.

Thank you 4 ur time.