There are many people who have asked about the nature of the project’s development being individually driven.
I find this interesting for several reasons:
- The status quo is a party you’re not invited to: Projects with many dedicated developers at the first public onset of the project typically are paying those developers. Quilibrium, Inc. has not closed an investment round – everything that has been done in service of the protocol has been out of my own and other volunteers’ pockets and time available. To have grown to the place we are, at the speed that we have on this without venture capital cannot be understated – it literally hasn’t happened before. Sometimes people compare us to projects in similar categories – of course there are other projects with massive marketing campaigns, announced huge partnerships, have more dedicated developers – VCs do a lot of things for projects, not to mention strongly encourage their portcos to build on top of each other which inflates the partnerships angle, but at the greatest cost: all of them demand token warrants. If a crypto project has announced tens of millions of dollars invested in them for a seed round by a venture fund, they took the Mephistophelean bargain, and by consequence, especially if an American company in the current regulatory regime, have agreed to get sued, or are implicitly agreeing to defraud the LPs of the fund (and the VCs know this) by never actually issuing a token. In either case, the public loses.
- A little background: I have a history for making projects and companies that are under-resourced possible, and each one has a little bit of influence on the way Quilibrium has been shaped today. Specific to the field of MPC, in my two years at Coinbase, there are six patents under my belt (but don’t get me too fired up about software patents, I hate them immensely – that being said, Coinbase is wonderfully part of the Cryptocurrency Open Patent Alliance):
- The most important part of crypto history: All of this exists because one anonymous individual started it all on Metzdowd. It was certainly an easier time then because projects were able to live more quietly, with less rapid adoption, but the adversarial conditions existed all the same. And there’s something to consider about Satoshi: Satoshi left, but only after the project was in a state where there were maintainers contributing at or above their level.
And to that last point, I want Quilibrium to reach a “Satoshi point” – such that if something were to happen to me, the project can keep going strong. That being said, while a lot of startup founders operate on the notion of “what can I see myself doing for the next ten years?”, I’m working on the notion of “what can I see myself doing for the rest of my life?” Getting to 2.0 is an important point for the former notion of reaching a steady state, after which I can focus more on developer tooling, onboarding, and deeper educational resources.