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It was once said that the internet would make it possible for anyone with 1,000 fans to make a living, but Li Jin believes that in the age of NFTs, one or two serious supporters may be enough.

Jin is a flag bearer for the passion economy,” which she describes as an economic system that allows and encourages people to make money while following their passions. For Jin, NFTs are a new tool that helps creators in the passion economy reach their true fans and form lasting relationships with them.

Through her venture firm, Atelier, Jin invests in platforms that lower the barriers to entrepreneurship and broaden paths to work. With a past in venture capital, she is well placed to help transform the way we think about work.

Bringing the passion back

It’s been my dream to live in Paris, so I’m just hanging out here for the time being, Jin tells Magazine toward the end of the interview, which comes after the wrap-up of the much-anticipated Ethereum Community Conference conference, also known as EthCC, that took place in the city. Despite admitting that she does not fully understand why people are working on DeFi, which occupied much of the attention of conference-goers, Jin organized a lunch for people working at the intersection of crypto and the creator economy.

The present difficulties of travel are a good reason to savor every bit of a new city, but hanging out in a new place is, for the time being, not something the average worker can do, seeing as they tend to be chained to pesky things like physical offices and scheduled, mandatory in-person meetings. That’s, however, not the case for many creators especially ones in the passion economy.

Why do we work, after all? When you ask a child what they want to do when they grow up, the answer is often hopefully filled with playfulness and passion. When asked why they chose a specific career, the answer rarely revolves around salary, job security or benefits. Upon growing up, many seem to abandon these core motivations, instead seeking a living by fitting into a corporate structure or mindlessly filling freelance orders.

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The passion seems to be coming back, according to Jin. There is a shift underway from gig marketplaces, which were built around really commoditized services and products, to more flexible, creative marketplaces that would actually enable people to make income from doing more of the things that they really love, she explains optimistically.

This is the core of the passion economy, which represents a new type of work that is completely separate from a traditional employer-employee relationship. This means that a passion worker, if we can call them that, does not answer to bosses in a corporate structure, nor do they act as interchangeable or fungible freelancers a la Fiverr or Uber. Instead, they simply do their thing and clients/subscribers pay for the privilege of being part of the journey.

In a sense, the output of any creative worker be it written, designed or painted is in effect a nonreplicable, nonfungible token of their effort. This article is, in effect, an off-blockchain NFT created by myself sold to Magazine, but forever connected to me. The work output of non-creative workers like security guards or Uber drivers is decidedly less like a unique NFT and more like a commoditized, non-supply-capped work hour token with a clear market value.

The relationship between NFTs and creative work is far more than mere associative wordplay, as the technology allows creatives to mint their work on the blockchain and benefit from its sales and resales.

This year, a lot of creators became aware of crypto and what it could do for them in terms of earning income in a way that wasn’t possible before.

Venture capitalist

Jin hails from Beijing, with her academic-minded parents immigrating to Pittsburgh in the early 1990s. She describes growing up very poor during her first years in America, leading her parents to push her toward a safe career.

She enrolled at Harvard University in 2008, but her parents were unhappy with her major English literature telling her that she was doomed to become a starving writer and that her choice was bringing shame upon the family. To appease her parents, Jin switched to statistics.

For her first job, she worked as a reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where she was sent to cover the G20 conference as an 19-year-old. She worked in mergers & acquisitions at Blackstone in 2011 during college, and later worked for several years as a Strategy Associate at Capital One and Product Manager at Shopkick, a mobile shopping startup in Silicon Valley.

When Shopkick was acquired, Jin was unsure of my next role in tech, and followed the path of her peers and started at a Master in Business Administration degree at Wharton in 2016, but continued to apply for jobs If you want to stay in technology, maybe you should try venture capital it’ll be a really great way to have a more bird’s-eye view of the whole industry, a mentor advised her.

She dropped out two weeks in after getting an offer from Andressen Horowitz, the famous venture capital firm also known as a16z. I didn’t really want to go to business school, she recalls.

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As a deal partner, Jin was responsible for meeting with startups all day, talking to founders, taking pitches, helping with the due diligence process, often sitting on the boards of companies as an observer for her employer. Many of these companies were what Jin refers to as consumer creator platforms, like Imgur, Patreon and Substack.

For Jin, these companies signal a shift from the gig economy to the passion economy, where new platforms enable people to do what they love for a living and to monetize their individuality. One by one, the tools enabling a thriving creative middle class are being released. In her February 2020 article 100 True Fans, she lays out a formula by which creatives can achieve a middle-class income of $100,000 per year with only 100 true fans who each contribute an average of $83 per month.

Today, much of Jin’s envisioned middle class of creatives remain digital peasants, uploading, probably, millions hundreds of millions of images every day to Instagram and getting no share of the advertising revenue.

Instagram makes a ton on advertising, but creators don’t see any of that I think of that as 100% taxation.

Artists get no material benefit even if millions view their profiles. Instagram, on the other hand, gets billions of dollars worth of equity value for itself from the labor of its posters why shouldn’t content creators demand a share of the cheese? Beeple posted nearly 5,000 pieces of art before finally cashing in for tens of millions with the NFT boom.

In July 2020, Jin decided that it was time to practice what she was preaching and build an entire firm that was dedicated to this particular emerging category, and so that’s what I did and I also felt like the best way to understand something and to evaluate it is to live it myself.

The result was Atelier, an investment firm with an initial $13 million portfolio of platforms that allow users to forge their own futures.

I started Atelier to fund a specific vision of the world: a world in which people are able to do what they love for a living and to have a more fulfilling and purposeful life.

Crypto connection

Jin was first exposed to cryptocurrency in 2017 when her employer, a16z, became one of the earliest funds that started its own crypto fund. Though she often worked with people involved with the fund, she found the industry abstract, as It wasn’t yet touching everyday consumers.

This year, things have changed.

There’s been way more intersection with consumers and the creator economy, particularly this year with NFTs.

NFTs, Jin believes, take her idea of 100 true fans even further. You could just have one true fan, or ideally like two true fans who bid against each other, she explains. Though only one person would finally own each digital asset, Their content can still be freely accessible and can spread virally, launching a chain reaction that makes it even more likely that true fans who really value and are willing to pay for the original version will come along.

After writing an essay titled The Case For Universal Creative Income in April of this year, Jin auctioned an NFT representing the article for 5.6969 ETH all of which was donated to Yield Guild Games’ Sponsor-A-Scholar program. Though anyone can read the article for free, someone paid 5.6969 ETH for the original.

Jin feels that creatives should view crypto as a way to monetize their work, which she describes as the third step of the creative economy funnel. The first step is all about How do I build my audience how do I get discovered? The second step is How do I engage my audience more deeply?

Though cryptocurrency and NFTs have huge potential as rocket fuel for the passion economy a term Jin coined her main focus lies with fostering creators in making the jump. She runs a course, “Building for the Creator Economy,” that teaches participants the ins and outs of her world over three weeks.

Earlier this year, she also launched the Atelier Angels Pilot Program to train 30 founders to become angel investors thereby gaining additional revenue streams while learning more about business. For Jin and Atelier, the future belongs to the creators so who better to invest in it?

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What if sperm were uploaded or perhaps, erm, unloaded onto the Bitcoin network, and those seeking to become pregnant could turn the emotional, complex task into something more approachable, where they choose the right swimmers on the blockchain according to attributes like education level, hobbies and physical attributes?

Wei Escala is the founder and CEO of Eggschain, an Austin-based startup building a supply chain solution for the assisted reproduction industry. In vitro fertilization (IVF) is the process of implanting a fertilized egg into a womans ovaries in order to induce pregnancy. This requires sperm, which is sometimes contributed by a partner and sometimes by a donor.

Its part of a new breed of projects built on Stacks, a blockchain that shares a native connection with Bitcoin through proof-of-transfer, which enables decentralized apps, smart contracts, and digital assets to be settled and verified on Bitcoin blocks.Eggschain is one of these new decentralized apps, or DApps.

But why do sperm donations and embryo implantations need to be registered on a blockchain, to begin with? The answers lie in scalability for a seamless sperm selection process across various jurisdictions, not to mention high-level patient-data protection, guarding against loss or misfiling of data, and making the system more transparent overall.

If things go well, Eggshains blockchain-based matching solution may soon bear fruit around the world. Its not here yet, but the revolution is coming.

Eggschain

Eggschains blockchain is secured by Bitcoin via Stacks, a Y Combinator-incubated startup building a user-owned Internet secured by Bitcoin. In practice, this means that Stacks operationalizes smart contracts and DApps, such as Eggschain, by synching up with Bitcoin on every 10-minute block to embed an indelible, permanent record.

Dear community, the moment we have all been waiting for.

We couldn't be happier to announce our first cohort of 25 startups building on Bitcoin w/ Stacks.

https://t.co/2iZ1kOiGhy

— startups.btc (@StacksStartups) June 23, 2021

The Eggschain solution has not yet been released. I dont want to commit to a timeline, Escala says, in part because, We are among the first developers building on the Stacks blockchain. This seems to be a reasonable answer, as it is common for blockchain projects to hit delays whether caused by technical, legal or budgetary challenges.

While lower transaction fees influenced the choice to build on a Bitcoin sidechain instead of other chains like Ethereum, Bitcoins reputation as an incorruptible ledger was decisive. Bitcoin will be around for hundreds or thousands or millions of years, Escala says, as if stating a basic scientific fact. While speaking of millions of years can be written off as overzealous marketing, choosing a chain to track reproduction means backing the one most likely to survive far into the future.

Bitcoin is the oldest blockchain in the world and very established, and the gas fees are low compared to some of the other leading blockchains by a huge magnitude.

Escala explains that When your sperm is donated, that is a transaction that gets hashed onto the blockchain, complete with an indelible time stamp. Further transactions take place when the sperm is implanted into a woman or into an egg. The time between egg fertilization and implantation can stretch for years, and sperm has been kept frozen for as long as 22 years and still been used successfully.

In practice, this means that a donor will be able to see how many times their sperm has been used, giving them a rough idea of how many children they might have and in what general areas. This may even serve to gamify the sperm donation experience, even if the donor is not willing to ever be contacted by their offspring.

Though Bitcoin itself is a transparent blockchain that allows transactions to be traced back, Escala explains that Eggschain, as it functions with Stacks, cannot be backtracked in such a way that the family tree can be tracked up and down. This is by design, as Just because someone received your donated sperm, it doesnt give them the authority to read through your life it is almost an invasion of your privacy, according to Escala.

Patient identifiable information cannot be on the blockchain.

Freezing desire

In India and much of Africa, it is normal for women to have their first baby by the age of 20. At 25, the United States represents the lowest mean age in the Western world, with the average first-time mother in countries like Germany, Singapore, Japan, the United Kingdom and Australia flirting with or even surpassing 30 the age at which fertility begins to decline.

Though access to contraceptives and changed values contribute to the higher ages in the West, careers and finances often play a role. The pressure to delay pregnancy is all the more increased with the modern reality that career growth often requires frequent moving between offices and countries though perhaps the work-from-home era will bring change.

Heath issues like cancer, which is rising worldwide, is another driver for the treatment, as woman seek to preserve their eggs before they are potentially damaged through chemotherapy treatment. All things considered, it is easy to see why many women are choosing to freeze their eggs just in case they decline in quality or run out before they want to use them.

When her best friend chose to freeze her eggs in 2018, Escala was a witness every step of the way I felt like I almost lived through the entire experience. In addition to a friend, however, she is a businesswoman, and she sensed an opportunity to improve the IVF process.

In June 2018, Escala founded Eggschain.

Breeding process

Provided there is no preselected partner, the process of choosing sperm or more accurately, a sperm donor is an intimate and difficult one. For one, donors need to be checked at an established lab for STDs, HIV and any hereditary diseases, with their sperm held in quarantine for often up to six months.

Depending on the sperm bank and the laws of the donors country, there is often extensive information available about the prospective donor, such as education level, hobbies and physical attributes all of these attributes attached to the given sperm sample by way of Eggschain.

I can say I want a sperm donor who has curly hair, and maybe a college degree and ideally, this sperm donor plays violin, Escala explains, listing attributes that can often be selected for. She also suggests that someone who likes basketball might choose a donor who is of a certain height and plays basketball.

All of these anonymous attributes can be added to the blockchain, effectively becoming the stats of the specific sperm, making selecting a sperm a smoother experience. While not remotely comparable to a serious medical procedure, the chain’s function has a metaphorical similarity to certain NFT-based games, where characters DNA is tracked on the blockchain as it get passed on to descendants. The ethical implications of choosing designer babies are presumably left to the users to wrestle with.

Corporate travels

Escala does not fill the stereotype of a shoot-from-the-hip cowboy blockchain entrepreneur. Despite spending a career in marketing and a lot of supply chain, she presents as a meticulous scientist who is careful with definitions and technicalities a nerd, even.

She was born in Austin, Texas and moved to Singapore at the age of 15. There, she attended Temasek Junior College where she studied physics, math and organic chemistry before heading back to Austin to be closer to my good friends and join the bustling startup scene there. She enrolled in a computer science program at The University of Texas at Austin, where she became interested in cryptography and machine-human interaction.

I graduated right after 9/11, so a few of my offers were rescinded, she recalls. Despite the turbulence, by March 2002 she was working as a stockbroker and financial adviser with American Express in Salt Lake City, Utah. She also worked as a branch manager for SunTrust Bank in Hampton, Virginia.

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Not quite satisfied with her career in finance, Escala completed an MBA in marketing, strategy and general management at Emory Universitys Goizueta Business School in Atlanta. This was followed by 15 years of corporate career growth, which saw Escala bounce between cities across the continental United States, staying on most jobs for a year or two.

Ohio. New York. Texas. Ohio. Kentucky.

And back to Austin, Texas in 2017. There, she worked as CEO of Powerista, which could help anyone to build a website in under 2 minutes! It didnt last but is still being marketed by someone with obvious marketing chops.

It was in Austin that Escala encountered blockchain at a South by Southwest conference in 2018, and she immediately saw an application in using it to track biospecimens for personalized medicine.

Coming revolution

Under Escalas vision, sperm banks all around the world effectively the front end or user interface of sperm donation could plug into the Eggschain back end. This could, in theory, allow patients a much broader pool of sperm to select from. The laws of various jurisdictions could be programmed into the chain as well, effectively minimizing the legal red tape of international inseminations.

Due to the scalability potential once the system is implemented, Eggschain has set its targets high. We hope, provide a universal tracking system for all the patients in the world, Escala says, speaking of everyone involved in the IVF process.

Since Eggschains patented solution covers the matching and tracking of genetic material using the blockchain, that means that sperm and embryos are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the potential applications of Eggschain in the future.

Organs, tissues and other bio-specimens can absolutely use the system in the future, Escala says with optimism.

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While Islamic scholars have long wrestled with the question of whether cryptocurrency is halal, what if its really fiat that isnt permissible?

Islam has strict rules around finance, and it historically defines currency as commodities with intrinsic value gold, silver, or salt, among others. Waseem Mamlouk, from the DeFi platform Nimbus, argues that government-issued fiat currencies do not have any intrinsic value and may be incompatible with a careful interpretation of Sharia law. This would pose a problem for the burgeoning Islamic finance industry, which aims to produce financial returns in compliance with religious law.

Mined cryptocurrencies have intrinsic value because it costs a certain amount to produce them but fiat currencies that are printed digitally onto a balance sheet have no intrinsic value whatsoever.

Mamlouk sees cryptocurrencies as a viable alternative. As the vice president of Capital Markets for Nimbus, Mamlouk is working to have portions of the business certified as Sharia-compliant in order to dip into the growing pool of investors who want their investments to fit with their religious beliefs. While this would certainly bring profits, Mamlouk also sees Islamic finance as a way to promote responsible long-term investing.

Mamlouks contention that fiat money has no intrinsic value is certainly a controversial one and would carry huge ramifications for the Islamic finance industry if his evaluation took on a wider acceptance. In effect, he is saying that fiat is not halal. He is not the first person to question fiats potential incompatibility with Islamic finance, as there has long been an academic discussion regarding a desire to return to a gold standard like in the times of classical Byzantium.

So, immediately, if we’re going to talk about someone doing dollar-denominated Sharia-compliant funds, it doesn’t really make sense from the get-go. However, with mined cryptos, it actually does make sense.

It was an honour to participate in panel discussions on Challenger Banks & FinTech Disruptions at The 1st International Islamic Fintech Summit 2019 hosted by @ashurst London. Great ideas/opportunities for FinTech and Crypto in Islamic Finance. pic.twitter.com/oJKi4eKaSo

— Dr Kingsley Udofa (@DrKUdofa) February 15, 2019

Islamic Finance

Mamlouk believes that cryptocurrencies hold the key to a better implementation of Islamic banking. In short, this refers to financial and banking practices in line with Islamic religious teachings. Of these religious teachings, the central one is a prohibition on riba, generally equated to usury or charging interest.

With interest being a major part of the current DeFi landscape, Islamic DeFi, which must not involve interest, will require custom solutions. In the Islamic banking industry, Mamlouk explains that bank fees sometimes replace earnings that would otherwise come from interest, but he is not a fan.

Banks like to play on people with different words and terms. We’re going to charge you fees but we’re not going to charge you interest we know what that is.

Islamic economics includes a broad idea that money must be earned through fair and legitimate work instead of unfair exploitation, often compared to the labor theory of value. For that same reason, the money received for work must have real and intrinsic value.

Though there are no exact numbers, The Economist has estimatedthat Islamic Finance accounts for $2 trillion a year and is poised to reach $3.69 trillion in 2024 according to Gulf Business. Considering that the global population of Muslims is expected to increase by 70% from 1.8 billion in 2015 to nearly 3 billion in 2060 according to Pew Research Center, financial services geared towards Islamic sensibilities are certain to continue attracting capital.

Though Islamic finance has been around much longer, it is an unlikely brother of the cryptocurrency industry. They are both fast-growing financial industries each controlling roughly 1% of global assets and hopes for a much larger share in the years to come.

What are the rules?

Much of the rules of Islamic banking center around the concept of riba, generally understood to mean usury. This makes paying or earning interest haraam, meaning forbidden. You’re not getting interest on a certain amount of money that you’re depositing, Mamlouk says.

There is a prohibition on selling what you do not own, according to him, meaning that short selling, derivatives, and potentially even day-trading of stocks are off the table, as stocks do not normally get settled until the end of each business day, and one may end up re-selling shares before they have even received them. At least as far as the issue of custody goes, the immediate settlement of swaps on the cryptocurrency market may well be an answer.

While many crypto traders would be horrified at the prospect of limiting themselves to multi-day spot trades instead of high-margin day trading, Mamlouk does not feel that he is missing out. Ive never done any of them personally, and you know, here I am, still alive and well it’s not that difficult to follow the rules, he says with a friendly laugh.

Gambling, known as maisir, is also prohibited. This is in part because it implies gaining money by chance instead of through legitimate effort. A comparable concept, bay’ al-gharar, includes any trade that involves excessive, unreasonable risk that, too, is haraam.

Unreasonable risk sounds a lot like cryptocurrency, especially in the early days. Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency based on speculation and memes, seems to fit the description of gambling or excessive risk. Is Dogecoin haraam? Mamlouk figures it would be, cautiously reasoning that it has no project, and that’s pure speculation. Thats a no on Doge from Mamlouk (but the jury’s still out).

Another important aspect of Islamic finance, according to Mamlouk, is ensuring that Sharia-compliant funds do not mix with non-compliant funds. He goes on to say that this is a very difficult ask for the modern financial system, as banks contain money from many different sources.

That could be blood money that could be an arms dealers money sitting in some foreign bank, with the banking officials having no way to know where their clients’ money truly came from, and thus no ability to tell other clients that the money held in the bank comes from legitimate and permissible sources.

Cryptocurrencies hold the key to fix many of these problems, Mamlouk believes. Chief among these is the inherent traceability of many cryptocurrencies, and that one can mine or acquire newly mined or minted coins with a verifiable pedigree and thus a moral purity that can absolutely be ascertained.

The strict approach of Islamic finance might just offer the counterweight that opens the doors for a billion Muslims around the world to participate in the blockchain revolution.

Early passions

Mamlouk was born in DC, USA but grew up in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where his father worked for the government-owned Saudi Aramco oil company. He describes the environment he grew up in and still lives in today as a highly intellectual, international community.” When he was young, he remembers being taken to see a supercomputer, one of only three in the world at that time. The experience stuck with him and led to his interest in technology, crypto and financial solutions.

He returned to his native DC to study commercial law at American University, where he graduated in 1994 and embarked on a career in finance IT advisery (early fintech) and IT security staying out of the courtroom in favor of lending his advice to financial, tech and telecom corporations in the Middle East and globally.

Back in the day, he says, investment banking did not really exist in the Middle East. Mamlouk took part in founding Atlas Investment Group in Amman, Jordan, later selling to Arab Bank, which he calls the largest bank in the Middle East. As he advanced in his career, he saw the growing dominance of computers and the internet, which inspired him to return to the US to study IT at the University of Virginia and graduated in 1999, the year leading up to the infamous Y2K bug.

Nimbus

Mamlouks next goal is to get some of Nimbus solutions certified as Sharia-compliant in order to reach a wider pool of users. Currently based in Malta, Nimbus is a DAO-governed platform giving users access to a number of DApps that opens the door to various potential revenue streams, including things like crypto staking, trading and lending, among others.

So how does a financial venture get certified as Sharia-compliant?

Neither the process nor requirements are standardized, as Islam is not a centralized religion in the way of Catholicism, for example. Instead, each country Pakistan, Iran, Malaysia and the member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council, for example will have their own systems and procedures in place.

These systems can differ, as evidenced by Malaysia’s Shariah Advisory Council praising cryptos great potential.Whereas others, including the Grand Mufti of Egypt and Fatwa Center of Palestine, previously declared cryptocurrencies haraam.

Mamlouk has his sights on either Saudi Arabia or Bahrain, which he says have largely interchangeable regulations. Bahrain, whose central bank recently licensed Sharia-compliant crypto exchange, appears somewhat more nimble when it comes to innovation. The plan is to submit a proposal to a local Sharia council.

That council has to look at various aspects basically an audit, Mamlouk explains. Then, they may make a decision or give you certain pointers about what to change in order to be approved. After a successful audit by a Sharia council that examines the proposed practices, a project can be declared Sharia-compliant.

We are looking forward to having it blessed but we’re not looking forward to having a Sharia council because it’s a burden for us, it’s more about social responsibility.”

From Mamlouks perspective, the guidelines around Islamic finance can be thought of as more than the rules of a specific religion. This is because he sees them as generally promoting responsible practices that discourage undue risk while emphasizing transparency and honesty.

It’s a responsible investment, and it’s realistic, he says about the method.

Future views

The idea of Sharia Councils giving approvals to business practices and investment vehicles is fascinating and could encourage a captivating co-creation between fintech innovators and religious scholars.

This could point to a future where Sharia Councils audit all types of cryptocurrency projects, tokens and smart contracts before issuing opinions on their appropriateness for Muslim investors. Mamlouk agrees, saying that there is a huge opportunity for all types of rating and ranking services because we don’t have any of that.

As for the DeFi industry as a whole, Mamlouk is mega-bullish. He sees adoption skyrocketing around the world in the years to come.

There’s no way that DeFi grows less than 100%, on average, for the next five years very year and it’s going to compound. People are going to look at it after those five years and they’re gonna say wow, how did I not see this coming.”

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Even Chris Blecs biggest supporters acknowledge he can be as subtle as a sledgehammer when hes pushing for transparency from DeFi projects on Twitter.

The founder of DeFi Watch puts noses out of joint across the industry whether hes hammering Polygon for putting billions in the hands of two developers with admin keys or criticizing Rari Capital for being run by teenagers.

Hes exactly the kind of provocateur asking the sort of difficult questions those in power would love to see silenced. But in crypto, thats not possible and thats why he loves it.

In a decentralized community, I feel like Ive sort of found my groove a little bit, mostly because I cant be turned off, he laughs. Thats why Im drawn to crypto. Because I do think the day will come when, you know, when banks censor people if they violate norms, or if they dont comply with social standards. And Ill be first in line for that.

I promise you, if DeFi projects had a way today to censor people based on their political beliefs, there would be at least one doing it.

If you take a swing at the king…

As it happens, a recent Uniswap proposal was put forward to raise $50 million to bribe the 45-year-old to leave DeFi altogether. It emerged from a Twitter thread, in which industry luminaries, including DeFi Pulse co-founder Scott Lewis, MyCryptos Taylor Monahan and ChainLinkGod, variously accused him of being right-wing, dead wrong and of not acting in good faith.

Popular opinion: Chris Blec sucks.

Hes right but he has a shit poor way of showcasing his opinion.

Im tired of the constant complaints.

Youd think maybe he would shut up and found something.

— (@androolloyd) May 29, 2021

The proposal didnt pass a consensus check. It failed miserably, Blec says. I was actually rooting for it. If they paid me $50 million, I would leave. I will say that.

A Bitcoiner whose career has seen him work with Ultimate Fighting Championship, conservative commentator Glenn Beck and Mad Moneys Jim Cramer, his combative approach is worlds away from the softly spoken Ethereum developers who actually build most DeFi projects. Uniswap inventor Hayden Adams, for example, appears to hold him in contempt.

He has been kind of open about his disdain for me in general, Blec says. I dont think he likes the way that I express myself. I think he really comes from that background of tech utopia a little bit. You know, having these really controlled environments and safe spaces. And Im the opposite. So, its a little bit like oil and vinegar.

None of the blowback he receives has deterred him in the slightest. Blec believes that calling DeFi projects out on their flaws is the only way to ensure user funds are protected and the sector stays out of the hands of banks and institutions.

I think theres valuable contributions Im making that I want to keep making, but theres a lot of people that dont want me to make them.

Governance theater

Blecs most recent campaign is unlikely to have endeared him any further to Adams. Hes been the most vocal critic of a recently passed Uniswap proposal to create a 1-million UNI fund to support lobbying efforts for better DeFi laws and regulation.

Opposed on principle to disgusting D.C. lobbying, he believes the fund, proposed by the Harvard Law Blockchain and Fintech Initiative, shows Uniswaps governance isnt decentralized: 18% of tokens are controlled by early VC investors, and a further 21.2% of votes are in the hands of the team.

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Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, also known as A16z, controls enough tokens on its own to exceed the 40-million UNI threshold required to pass a proposal. While it has delegated its votes to a variety of university blockchain associations at Harvard, University of California, Berkley and Stanford University, as well as projects like Gauntlet, Blec suspects it instigated the lobbying fund proposal to benefit its portfolio of DeFi investments.

If Andreessen Horowitz wants to take $40 million out of the Treasury to fund this committee because its going to help their corporate interests, then that should be known. That shouldnt be a secret, you know, so thats what I really try to pursue with this stuff.

Voting on $UNI "DeFi Education Fund" is over.

1m UNI will be transferred to the custody of the new committee.

Vote was decided by proxies of VCs (i.e. @a16z) and @Uniswap team members.

This #DeFiWatch request for transparency was received but ignored.https://t.co/7if3lAaYdt

— Chris Blec (@ChrisBlec) June 29, 2021

Of course, theres no hard evidence that A16z was behind this proposal or instructed its delegates on how to vote. However, its interesting to note that the final tally of votes shows that Harvard, Berkley, Stanford, Gauntlet and former Andreessen Horowitz partner Jesse Walden tipped in 40.5 million votes among them. Another 10.5 million votes came from other university-affiliated organizations, although its not confirmed if they have been delegated votes from A16z.

While there was plenty of support from elsewhere for the Education Fund including from community members and Consensys Blec is raising valid governance issues:

The reason Im so adamant about it is because its setting a trend, and others are watching, and I want people to see, its not as easy as they want it to be because youre gonna have fat guys in Florida like me, breathing down your neck, looking for transparency. You cant hide all this stuff and not expect people to ask questions.

Blecs journey

Born in New Jersey in 1975, Blec was mad keen on radio growing up. I loved to listen to the radio and call into the radio stations and stuff in the 80s, he says, explaining one of his first jobs was as a DJ for Smooth FM in New York in the 1990s. He built the stations website on the side using his rudimentary knowledge of HTML.

He left New York after 9/11 for obvious reasons and helped build Total Nonstop Action Impact Wrestling in Nashville from 2003 onward. That led to a really cool job in Las Vegas looking after marketing for the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

I joke that he must have learned his pugnacious approach to Twitter from five years working alongside wrestlers and martial artists. Surprisingly he agrees. Its actually true because part of it was that I worked for a fight promoter there that was pretty intense. And then before that, I worked with professional wrestlers. And, you know, working in radio was also kind of like a cage fight every day. He adds:

After that, I stayed in television. I worked with Glenn Beck, whos like a conservative talk show host, and I helped them run their digital television network. It was called TheBlaze. And so, hes a pretty big personality. And then I also worked for a short time with Jim Cramer.

On the money

Blec first bought Bitcoin in 2015 for a long trip through South East Asia with his wife, as it seemed like a convenient payment method while traveling, but it wasnt until early 2017 that he fell down the rabbit hole. He explains he was doing an online course on the history of money because Im a nerd when he had an epiphany about why Bitcoin was such a leap forward.

I remember that precise moment I was in my living room: I jumped up and I was like, I need to find that Bitcoin stuff. I need to learn about that. Because I just connected it to everything Id ever believed in as far as liberty and politics and stuff. And I just raced to try to learn everything I could after that.

He quit his job on The Street to work as a consultant in crypto full time, and during the ICO boom, he was involved in a project that tried and failed to launch a gold-linked token, which gave him his first peek behind the curtain.

I learned about all the mistakes you can make in the space as far as security, and I swear, I kind of had this moment with that where I realized that smart contracts are not entirely unchangeable and that there are parts of them that can be modified. It started to open my mind.

He started posting crypto education videos on YouTube in 2018 and launched a specialist DeFi channel the following year with explanations of how to use protocols like Maker and Compound.

I really think I brought thousands of people to DeFi through the videos, he says. But I mean, now YouTube is pulling off videos just for saying one little thing

Blecs referring to reports that YouTube censored a video featuring mRNA technology inventor Dr. Robert Malone and others for expressing concerns over the COVID-19 vaccine. In protest, Blec recently pulled all of his video content from the platform.

That was the one that I just cracked and I was like, if were supposed to be building a censorship-resistant technology here in crypto, how am I supporting a business that just completely is opposed to any sort of rational dialogue? So, I pulled it off and Im looking for another home for it.

Blec is also deeply unhappy with mask mandates and lockdowns, skeptical about vaccines, and moved from oppressive New Jersey to Miami Beach this year to take advantage of its more relaxed approach.

Florida is crazy right now. Theyre setting records with real estate. And everybodys just trying to come here because theres the least amount of rules here.

The fact Miami mayor Francis Suarez is a Bitcoiner is an added bonus. The tech scene is growing so quickly, and I know a lot of people moved here last year. Its just kind of an exciting place to be right now, he says.

Bitcoiner in the ETH house

Blec approaches DeFi with the mindset of a Bitcoiner, rather than an Etherean, and has a laser-like focus on decentralization. DeFi Watch emerged as a result of Blec learning that Compound and other projects had an admin key providing devs with God Mode style control over funds and contracts.

That was the first time that I really had the realization that with DeFi, things werent always as it seemed, he says of the gulf between the rhetoric and the reality.

It suddenly struck me, like, Okay, wait a minute theyve kept some sort of centralized control? Who is it that holds this control? Why are they holding the control? How are they using it? And I just started asking all these questions.

He started digging into other projects to see if they had similar issues (many did) and put the results in a popular spreadsheet that got so many views he started up the DeFi Watch site to house all the information hed collected.

Eventually, it became impossible to keep up with all the new projects launching, so he now focuses on representative examples, with the self-taught Blec roaming GitHub looking for telltale signs theres centralized control putting user funds at risk.

He says his goal is to educate DeFi users to be constantly skeptical so that they are thinking about these issues all the time. The endless array of exploits of DeFi protocols attest to the fact that sloppy security and poorly designed smart contracts are rampant. Blec says the June 20 Visor Finance exploit, in which $500,000 was lost, is yet another admin key fiasco.

They had their private key accidentally saved in their GitHub repo. I mean, to me, thats like the ultimate. And as soon as you see that kind of negligence or ineptness from a developer, they can be the nicest guys in the world. But if theyre that bad, you have to just run.

Administering the key

Projects often use admin keys, while the protocol is still being built in order to quickly fix security issues or stop exploits, with the goal of getting rid of it once the project is stable and ready for full decentralization. In order to mitigate the risks, many projects have adopted a multisig admin key, which requires a certain number of people to independently approve its use for a particular action.

This is not without its flaws either. Blec has been hammering away at Ethereum layer-two scaling solution Polygon for using a multisig to secure $8.32 billion in total value locked. When he began asking questions, they were using a two-of-three multisig, meaning that just two people could have colluded to make off with the funds, or had the access stolen from them.

There was billions of dollars flying around on this blockchain that basically was relying on three developers not to lose their Ledger Nano S devices. When you think about it that way, its kind of crazy.

While its since been changed to a five-of-eight multisig, that still has issues, according to Blec, who argues that Polygon users need to trust that the signers have just one copy of their key and that the multisig was set up securely. Equally worrying, is the fact that the project is based in India, which has been toying with a crypto ban. Having five people able to make unilateral changes means regulators have an identifiable target.

What happens if a regulator comes along and says you have to use this key to comply with these regulations, or you have to turn off this network right now until you can figure out how to comply?

@ChrisBlec The Defi Cop pic.twitter.com/UY4rUN04aV

— Hexologist Ask Me About PulseChain Airdrop (@Hexologist31) July 6, 2021

Kids in the kitchen

For Blec, the only thing worse than having an admin key in the hands of developers is having an admin key in the hands of teenagers. Blec famously called out Rari Capitals team of teenage devs, including a 15-year-old named Jet in March. The eldest was just 20. While his criticism was controversial at the time, the protocol itself was exploited a month or so later for $11 million.

I did feel a little bad when they got hacked after I was criticizing them, he says. I sent that kid a message right away because I just felt bad for him. I just didnt want him to take it to heart even though it was a loss, and they did screw up. Blec says that hes sensitive to any situation where I feel like somebody could become depressed.

Ive had family members that have committed suicide and stuff, and it affected me pretty deep. And, you know, Ive always been sensitive to that kind of stuff as far as, you know, depression and things.

But he says asking tough questions is too important to stop just to avoid hurting peoples feelings.

Theres millions and sometimes billions of dollars at stake. So, its trying to balance the feelings of a developer whos got himself in way too deep with the finances of thousands of people who have their money staked.

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John Paller is training a new generation of blockchain workers and giving them the tools to live free from the chains of full-time employment.

After a chance conversation with a Russian dude wearing a weird T-shirt at a 2014 conference Vitalik Buterins father, Dmitry John Pallers life was transformed by having a front-row seat for the birth of Ethereum. He went on to create the largest Ethereum hackathon and founded an initiative to help at-risk youth find job opportunities in the burgeoning crypto industry.

According to Paller, the majority of workers in the United States will be independent and not tied to a particular employer within just a few years from now. But with so many of the necessities of life provided by employers rather than the government, he has set up a new token-based employment co-op to provide independent contractors with benefits, such as medical insurance and retirement plans.

Purple state Ethereum

Growing up in the predominantly Mormon state of Utah, which he describes as a rather dogmatic society, Paller remembers that as a child, he always asked too many questions. Not feeling like he fit in, he moved east over the Rocky Mountains to Denver, Colorado a few years after graduating from Southern Utah University with a business administration degree in accounting and finance in 1997.

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Denver, according to Paller, is more pragmatic politically we dont get caught up in political dogma as much as other states seem to do. This, he surmises, is due to a mixture of geographical and cultural influences, with a libertarian wild west culture from Wyoming in the north merging with a more liberal, progressive approach from the south in New Mexico and west from California.

I think that Ethereum as a concept really relates well to this sort of egalitarian approach building next-generation public infrastructure using smart contracts. We have a good tech scene here in Colorado.

He serves as the executive steward of ETHDenver, which started with monthly meetups of a couple dozen people before growing into the hundreds suddenly in 2017. This rapid growth inspired him to organize a hackathon in February 2018, a project for which he called up various industry players, such as Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, cryptocurrency entrepreneur Erik Voorhees, and dozens of other top projects and luminaries.

We were hoping for 401 people, and the reason for that was because ETH Waterloo in the fall of 2017 had 400 people, and we wanted to be the biggest one ever, he says.

The first event, which Paller describes as part Burning Man, part SXSW, part DevCon, and part Hack the North, was a huge success with 1,500 participants. With four years running so far, the event has become a home turf of the Ethereum movement. This year, we did a fully virtual event, and we hosted over 31,000 people from 94 countries, Paller explains proudly, adding that ETHDenver is transitioning into a true community-owned ecosystem called SporkDAO with a virtual launch party and NFT auction on June 26.

Worker woes

Pallers background is in human resources and finance, and in 2002, he co-founded a staffing company called PeoplePartners to focus on recruiting in the financial sector. After some success, the company managed to buy and merge with another, Lakeshore, where Paller continued to serve as CEO, while the new firm focused on HR technologies in what he refers to as the Uber-for economy where the firm was trying to create an app that would help companies find talent as quickly as Uber finds rides.

Much of Pallers vision for his HR firm revolved around a vague desire to help democratize employment, referring to what he saw as a lopsided social contract where employers have a huge amount of power over employees within U.S. society. Questions started to gnaw at him Why is employment so disproportionate in power and value distribution? Why is healthcare in the United States tied to employment?

It was while reading more broadly into economics and game theory, in hopes of answering these questions, that Paller came across Bitcoin from a friend working at a technology startup who told him it was the future of money. I read the white paper, and I kind of didnt get it, but I bought some, he recalls.

My name is Buterin, Dmitry Buterin

Buying some Bitcoin on a whim was, however, not Pallers only harbinger of blockchain destiny. While attending a small entrepreneurship conference in California in early 2014, he met Dmitry Buterin. There was only probably like 30 people there, so it was a very intimate affair, and he was the interesting, you know, Russian dude with the weird T-shirts, he says. As fathers, they connected over their families and because politically speaking, were both libertarians.

Due to this chance connection, Paller had a direct line to Vitaliks father, who made social media posts on the Ethereum white paper and the ICO. This meant that he had exposure to the project from an early stage and, in early 2016, asked Dmitry to connect him with his son, Vitalik, who was kind enough to spend several hours with me talking about my ideas for use cases. In hindsight, he was very gracious because my use case ideas were terrible I didnt understand decentralization at all, he recounts, adding that his mind was still stuck in the old world of centralized corporate structures.

He eventually did have the lights go on, at which point he decided to do a full pivot in life. It was almost kind of like my version of a midlife crisis, he explains regarding his sudden decision to sell his business, effectively turning his back on a successful career.

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Apprentio and the next generation

In 2018, Paller co-created Apprentio in collaboration with a local boys and girls club in hopes of providing at-risk youth with opportunities in the emerging blockchain ecosystem. Paller believes that the commonly prescribed path of high school/college/degree/job is not for everyone, especially considering that a four-year college degree in the U.S. can easily result in $100,000 of debt, and the graduation rate for at-risk youth kids that go to college is like 5% most of them drop out, he explains.

We assist these kids 1517 years old get involved in the blockchain technology space by participation in hackathons, building projects, mentoring, tutorials and free resources, and then ultimately hooking them up with projects that are looking for interns.

In Pallers view, Apprentio is investing in a new generation of specialized workers to fit the needs of the future not only the needs of companies but of the workers themselves. With the ability to work remotely and for several projects at the same time, Paller envisions a future with workers who are empowered by choice instead of being effectively held for ransom by employers who demand they work full time in one location in order to access the resources needed for survival.

Thanks @DenverKidsInc and @DenverScho for supporting @apprent_io student workshop! Shout out to https://t.co/8h1M2ocdVt cofounder @NMRCrypto and mentor @nickw_13 for a great @EthereumDenver experience! #ETHDenver #ETHDenver2019 pic.twitter.com/KkvPTOOzgQ

— L'Teisha Ryan (@LTeishaRyan) February 18, 2019

The old model is simply not working for workers, as evidenced by the fact that 70% of people in the U.S. labor force are sitting in jobs they hate because they have no better options. Of course, that is part of the problem the reason Americans allow themselves to be subjugated by a corporation is that independent workers lack the security and benefits, such as retirement, health insurance and disability protection afforded to most full-time employees. This total dependence on the employer is a peculiarly American experience, seeing as healthcare, in particular, is seen as a universal right in much of the world, including Canada, Europe and Australia, to name a few.

Self-employment The new normal

According to Paller, the U.S. workforce currently has about 35 million self-employed workers out of a total of 160 million. The movement began in earnest, with many workers not returning to their traditional jobs after the 2008 financial crisis, and following a year of on and off shutdowns and working from home, the trend is only increasing.

The rate of self-employment is accelerating even faster now due to the pandemic. The estimates are 90 million people by 2028 in the U.S. workforce alone.

Though the share of independent workers is rising, Paller sees an untapped niche in the market for human resource systems. From data management to identity verification and credentialing, all of it is designed with the corporation as the customer they are farmers of talent and the talent is the product, Paller explains.

On the blockchain side, the phenomenon of decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, is set to benefit from, and offer opportunities to, this growing crop of independent workers. Play-to-earn games, the increasingly popular framework of blockchain games that allow players to make money within the economies of video games, are also set to burgeon.

All of this poses challenges for governments, which can benefit from the arrangement where most people have an ongoing, full-time job because employment is a great way to make sure that taxes are paid, whereas managing the reporting of independent contractors is much more difficult.

Imagine a world where you work in 20 countries simultaneously with people that share your values, share your worldview, and you dont have to worry about any of the jurisdictional compliance.

Opolis co-op

Pallers brainchild, Opolis, bills itself as a member-owned digital employment cooperative providing benefits, payroll and shared services for the independent worker. Its his attempt to be part of the answer to the challenges of future work. By forming an employment cooperative, the vision is that workers can take back their agency from employers who previously defined their place in society.

The idea came to being in 2017, culminating in a white paper in 2019, followed by a year spent designing a micro-economy within the ecosystem. It is legally set up as a cooperative instead of a corporation or foundation, the latter of which Paller believes creates no incentives to build anything of economic value. As a Colorado cooperative, the entitys participants are able to hold patronage tokens. The token itself, while potentially profit-bearing, is not a security, according to Paller.

The Opolis Trustee announces the completion of a $5M Series Seed II equity and grants funding round. We are grateful to partner with aligned DeFi projects, DAOs, Strategic Investors and Angel Investors to build the future of $WORK

Read more below https://t.co/e0Cwj1zS3D pic.twitter.com/HFBHATHqnq

— OPOLIS (@opolis) May 13, 2021

Opolis being set up in this way seems to be more than a mere legal loophole as a co-operative or co-op is defined as an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned enterprise. Paller quotes Dr. Nathan Schneider, a local professor who has commented on the intersection of DAOs and co-ops, which hold many inherent similarities. He also notes that there are European cooperatives that are worth billions, so I think were gonna see a whole new wave of cooperatives.

On the ground level, Opolis is already operational and offers independent worker-members in the U.S. a host of services. The basics include health, dental and vision insurance available in various tiers to provide security for the worker, their spouses or entire families. For example, the combined health, dental and vision insurance premiums range from $313 to $557 per month for the worker alone, or from $1,125 to $1,845 for the whole family.

In addition to insurance, Opolis offers the opportunity to elect various retirement savings plans, methods to keep salary consistent even when taking time off, and tools to manage tax deductions for things such as wellness expenses.

On the services side, there is the possibility to create an integrated payroll from various income sources, which streamlines taxation and accounting and opens up the possibility to take a salary in cryptocurrency.

The cooperative is currently operational in only the U.S., but Paller envisions that it could become a global public utility in a way similar to internet infrastructure or cryptocurrency networks.

The goal is to become a global public utility infrastructure for employment at that scale, it doesn’t even need a name it would operate similarly to how people think about TCP IP or even Ethereum layer one. Itll just be a thing that is and does.

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